Nostalgia
by viper2999
Summary: A story of disappointment, loneliness, and saturnine heartache. Set during a night in the life of Xi'an Coy Manh.


A bit of a late birthday present to myself, that's since turned into a Christmas gift for myself. I've been working on this for over a year now, so you can see how well that's worked out for me. So many times I was tempted to just split it off into chapters, and leave it half finished for a few months, even though I didn't structure it to be read that way.

I guess some of its because I'm lazy, though also because I've rewritten the opening scene alone at least fourteen times. The extra months gave me room for a few last minute re-writes for _Battle For the Atom_, ('last minute' in the sense of 'nine months ago'), but overall I think I managed to keep it reasonably in canon. I did my best to make it raw and a bit scatter shot, as a few hours in the lives of two people who have realized they have forward course in their lives, and that they've lost the ability to keep pretending that they're not unhappy with where things have taken them. I think it turned out alright. If nothing else I'm happy that I had days where I only wrote two or three words, and then rewrote them, first thing I did, after waking up the next morning.

To me, Mekanix has long been the best Kitty Pryde story. I've always thought about writing a follow up to it. Claremont's post-80s work is often criticized, but _Mekanix _was the only thing he wrote that I thought was as effective as _God Loves, Man Kills—_and I think it was the most revealing of the author. There was a powerful sense of how costly freedom can be to us, and how terrible it would have to be to live in the lives of these characters who have the power to do whatever they want. Kitty can go wherever she want, but she has nowhere to go, because doesn't really belong anywhere. Xi'an is terrified of making her own decisions in life, because it would be so easy to just make the people around her follow her lead. That's how I've always seen them, anyway, and I like how their respective neuroses kind of cancel each other out.

I've never really understood the temptation so many people feel to write Kitty as happy-go-lucky. Her life sucks, and she doesn't deal with it particularly well. Kitty clearly has some kind of mental illness that she's, unsuccessfully, trying to work through over the course of her late teens. I would submit _Excalibur vol.1_ issue #105 in particular (where she denies that one of her friends is dead even after unearthing his rotting corpse) as evidence that she suffers from some form of depressive psychosis. Claremont's later work in _X-Men Unlimited_, _X-Treme X-Men,_ and _Mekanix_ also spells out that she's suffering from post-traumatic stress or depression, as does Whedon's _Astonishing X-Men_. I just don't like to portray Kitty as a dutiful girlfriend or a kind and considerate person; given all of the craziness in her life, I prefer the idea of her as a delusional basket case who is just barely holding on.

One of the things I've always wanted to deal with is kind of the unfortunate result of so many writers deciding to write Kitty as their girl-next-door fantasy, and have her end up in perfect true love with whoever the designated author-stand-in character is (i.e. Colossus, Pete Wisdom, Bobby Drake). None of that's inherently a bad idea except every incoming author immediately breaks up the previous established relationship, and it all kind of ends up with Kitty looking like a heartless sociopath after a while.

And I liked the Kitty/Xi'an relationship that never was, the total hopelessness of it, and more than enough people write about Pete, Piotr, and Bobby already. Maybe I'll write a Kitty/Doug reunion story next, or even Kitty and Jimmy Hudson, just to purge myself with some good feelings, but for now Kitty/Xi'an loneliness and regret and wishing for a do-over they can never have is my fix.

On a final note, thank you to everyone who rated or followed, or even just viewed, my other pieces. I'll be getting back to those now that this one is no longer devouring my life.

**Setting: **Marvel Entertainment's X-Men, as published by Marvel Comics. Set after _Astonishing X-Men vol. 3 issue #65. _Intermittent references to _New Exiles_, _X-Treme X-Men vol. 1_, _Wolverine &amp; the X-Men vol. 1_,_ Excalibur vol. 1_, and _Mekanix_.

**Trigger Warnings: **thoughts of suicide and general existential misery

**Characters:** Xi'an Coy Manh, Katherine Anne Pryde, Illyana Nikolievna Rasputina, Jubilation Lee, Lockheed

**Archive:** FanFiction and Archive of Our Own

* * *

**Nostalgia**

_An "Astonishing X-Men" novella_

**J.M. Andersen**

**1.**

She had found herself adrift, and alone, in the tailing throes of those waning days. A second grueling week since her unexpected, and unwelcome, inheritance had left Hatchi Tech under her control; it was all solely and squarely entrusted to her well meaning, but frustratingly incapable hands. She hated to admit it, but it wasn't the first time a personal tragedy had left her with absolute responsibility: whether over her little brother and sister, over the New Mutants, or over Jean-Paul's students. It always seemed to work out the same way—just floating through life, making the best of things, until someone else took over for her. And in a strange way, whether it was through providing a bit of extra help for the kids, or bailing her team out of trouble before she could ruin them, she always seemed to have the same person to thank for it. Maybe it was just a confirmation bias, ignoring all of the times that her other friends were there for her as well, but that didn't change how she felt about falling into owning a defense contractor—of all things. It just seemed too convenient, in that weird, horribly inconvenient way that life was so good at kicking you in the nose with.

The money itself was the least of her ongoing problems; she would have to manage billions of dollars in revenue streams that she had already found herself utterly hopeless at untangling (let alone navigating), but there were far less surmountable difficulties beneath the surface. There were innumerable advances in human genetic engineering, military ordnance, and crossover nanotechnology each so horrifying that she had dedicated her waking life to reading impenetrable progress reports in increasingly sour detail. She had forced herself to soak up everything, drinking it all in going back nine years into the past, but even then she still didn't know where the bottom floor might lay. Each time she thought herself close was the time for another precipitous fall, for one more rotted-out level to rupture beneath her feet, one mangling plunge after another.

Why had Da'o left it all to her? Xi'an was nothing to her. Just another despised half-sister, of whom 'estrangement' would have been far too charitable a mischaracterization. The first time they met had seen Da'o attempt to kill her mother, and herself, for having the life that their father had denied his second family. The second, and last, time they had met, Da'o had only been interested in targeting her again, even when it became her last living act. There had not been, and now there never could be, a reconciliation between sisters—just one spite lain bitterly upon another.

Hatchi Tech was one of the largest defense contractors in the world, approaching seven billion dollars in annual operating income, and she had no idea what to do with any of it. What did one even_ do_ with billions of dollars? Not liquid, of course, but privately held and still there to use however she wanted. Before she had lost her family, she had never wanted for money. And after, with the Professor and the school, with her work for her loathsome uncle, and even her life in Chicago, it had never really been an issue except for during a few rough patches. Xi'an was used to having means, but not used to being in control of generating more for others. She had never had that time to grow used to owning the present livelihoods of thousands of people, or used to knowing that every minute decision she made would be one that ruled their futures. It was just another temptation, another call towards controlling people, and another area in which to agonize over every choice she made.

Da'o had built her firm into a Global 500, and now there Xi'an was: still a ways off from her thirtieth birthday, with a Masters of Library and Information Science that had prepared her for none of her new obligations, and no idea of how to run a business—with even less idea of which (if any) of Da'o's board could be trusted. She found herself, in totality, to be out of her depth. She didn't know what to do with what she had been burdened with. She knew only that she (and the few mutants left, not to mention the at large human race) could scarcely afford to let any of it find its way onto an open market. Not with people like Hydra and the Purifiers still roaming around—just imagining what they could do with her sister's nanite bombs made her want to never leave her house again. A man like Matthew Riseman, or a woman like Viper, would not balk at infecting an entire city with such things.

She didn't know if she could keep Hatchi Tech under control. She didn't know if that house could be kept in order, without Da'o's amoral ruthlessness dragging on the reins of progress. Was that the idea? Did her sister just want to slow torture her from beyond her grave? To doom her to watch everything fall part around her, for everything to slip away into the piecemeal interstice occupied by her enemies? To show her who the better sister was, in spite of class, and breeding, and their respective conflicting mutual disadvantages?

And the situation certainly was an ungovernable one for her. She couldn't restructure, she couldn't sell, and couldn't afford to let go anyone in management or R&amp;D for fear of what they might do under less scrupulous direction.

What was she supposed to do, mind control them into being responsible?

There was a time when she could have washed her hands of it all and left it to Emma or the Professor. But Emma was well beyond her reach those days, and the good Professor Xavier was beyond even that. At that as well, it was almost tempting to sign it all over to Warren, to just let him and his faction handle the gross lot—but if anything went wrong...

It wouldn't be the first time that a Worthington Industries subsidiary went untended until disaster struck, and it just brought her back to her nightmares of the Red Skull gaining access to mind controlled, exploding, sleeper agents.

She didn't think her conscience could handle it, if she allowed her late sister's life's work fall into the wrong hands (the very hands Da'o had intended). Yet at the same time, she was so lost in this new world, that she doubted she would even know enough to suspect whose hands 'the wrong ones' were. At least not until it was already too late for mere misgivings to save her. She knew who Da'o's intended buyers for the nanite bombs were. But while that was enough to start a black list, it was hardly a comprehensive picture of every underhanded person in corporate America, let alone the rest of the world.

Day after day had gone by, still needing a decision, and still refusing to make the wrong one.

And so that day, like many others of late, had blurred together until she didn't know exactly when her phone had stopped buzzing; nor when the kids had stopped clamoring; nor the various personal and professional obligations, that had been unilaterally foisted upon her, had finally settled down enough to allow her some mean semblance of sleep. It was a cold night, when she finally found a few undisturbed hours, and still only September for all that there were near upon three feet of snow outside. It went without saying that the unscheduled global blizzard had found her under a fort's worth of covers, and with the heat turned up until she could smell dust burning.

Thank you very much, Robert Drake.

(Mutter, mutter. Mumble.) Or, so it went.

It had been an entire week, and still, no one had punched that man in the face. Not Logan, or Rogue, or Kitty. Not even once. How could that be? He had lackadaisically endangered all life on Earth, because he was in a bad mood. She was in a bad mood too! And she never tried to destroy the world over it. Not even once! There were so many people who just lived to punch things, and yet no one had taken this obvious opportunity to exact justice where it was most strenuously deserved. Being an original X-Man really counted for a lot, didn't it?

Where was Wade Wilson when you needed him?

At least Thor had hit Robert with his hammer. Maybe that would just have to be good enough.

Agitated once and again from her sleep, she tried to shift her body weight around and into a more comfortable posture, but encountered an annoying tug of resistance. She was tangled up in enough of her sheets, including the one that had somehow wrapped itself around her face, that she had become dimly afraid that she would strangle herself if she moved too quickly.

A possibility sprang to mind: 'Here lies Xi'an Coy Manh, beloved big sister and pseudo-parent, survived being blown up by gangsters and left to die shipwrecked in the South China Sea, but couldn't survive a fleece sheet.' Or was that too long to fit? Enough to contemplate but not to make her fight through the tightening constriction, and into the sharp air surrounding her.

She had never done particularly well with the cold. The twins were lucky at least, and seemed to have grown acclimated to it in a way that she still had not. All of those winters, growing up in New York and around the Great Lakes, maybe, were to thank for it. Beneath everything else, she had on a double-layer of long sleeved shirts and a pair of flannel night pants, along with a gray wool sock on her right foot and some ACE bandages (wrapped too tightly for comfort) around the stub that was leftover of her left leg. And even then, with heat and blankets, she still felt ice piercing through her the pulp of her teeth and the marrow of her bones. It was only after she had begun to loose sensation, there to wonder whether she was actually asleep and just lucid of her surroundings, or else if she was merely numb from the cold, when that insufferable tapping on her window took the uncertainty away from her.

She tried to ignore it, to close her eyes tighter and hope it would grow bored and flicker away soon, but it kept on tapping. She reached out to its mind, without expanding her own awareness beyond herself, thinking it only a bird or a raccoon. She had only wanted to gently nudge it along, into going away and finding someone else to bother. What she found instead was a mind far too alien for her cursory efforts to commandeer. When she tried to extend her extrasensory awareness to see what it was, all she found were threads of impulses wrapped around spools of emotions far too complex to unravel and catalog. But she recognized the impressionistic color of them all the same.

She would have known Lockheed anywhere.

* * *

**2.**

The quick shower she undertook was more for warmth than anything of substance. She fully expected to regret that meager, though vital, indulgence as soon as she stepped out into the cool night with damp hair. She had dressed herself as quickly as her condition would allow, just in a pair of jeans and uggs and a long shirt and green sweater—and her yellow hair band to keep the wet hair from flopping into her eyes and plastering itself against her face as it dried.

It was soul cold outside. She had not wished that awful robotic monster leg upon herself a moment more than was absolutely necessary, and on that night she would have denied it even if it were. Mr. Jeffries may have meant well, but that heavy, bulky, contrivance frightened animals as its servos squeaked, and made her an object of bemusement to her own children. It was an offense against dignity, in short, even if duty sometimes demanded a loss of dignity—as it did on those occasions where she needed the extra mobility it afforded her. But for that night, it was a different matter entirely.

The county had finished clearing the main roads and hauling excess snow, and everyone else had finally begun to plow and shovel the leftovers from Robert's autumn surprise around. Still more had to be packed down to keep it out of the way, and what remained had not even begun to thaw yet, and would not for some time—if at all. If their usual luck held, they would have an early winter, and not see the ground again until April. In short, there were many reasons she found herself constantly weighing the practicality of staying inside until the new year—there were a lot of side benefits to being a telepath.

It would have been one thing if there were dangerous X-Men business to attend, but the freeze of that metal leg was one that made her skin burn in irritation with even the best of circumstances. She didn't look forward to seeing how much worse it would be on a night where a ground blizzard could easily spring up out of nowhere. At least she'd had all of that glorious adrenaline, just as you get from the world ending, to keep her warm when the Iceman had first taken leave of his senses.

Fortunately she still had a spare prosthesis, in a much simpler mechanical design, like the ones that had been commonplace fifteen years before. It was far more discrete looking and fit easily under her jeans, as well as into one of her boots, and she could still limp around well enough. After Bastion and Limbo, she could limp around with the best of them. Mercifully, it had a plastic socket instead of (impractically, annoyingly, pointlessly) being made entirely out of metal. It could still be unpleasant to wear, but least she would not have to worry about giving herself frostbite.

Dr. McCoy was, at least last she heard, still 'working on that' for her. But growing a transplant limb took months if you wanted to do it satisfactorily. Kitty had once told her that it would actually be easier to just clone her, and have her change bodies, like the Professor did years ago when he was lost to the Brood. But that... no, that just felt wrong. Almost like something Farouk would do. She would continue to wait for the more complicated solution. Until that day came, walking with a limp was at least more dignified than running around feeling like a misshapen freak. Or worse: like a member of the X-Force. This way, at least, she found that she could avoid scrutiny by passing herself off as a war veteran. Which was more or less accurate, depending on how one looked at such things.

The first matter of the night's unanticipated business was seeing to the twins. She hated waking them when it was so late, but if she was strolling off into the dark, she wanted them to at least know what was going on. That way, they wouldn't have be afraid if they woke up early to find she was absent of them. Their family had endured enough, on that front. Her siblings had woken up too often to discover that their sister was gone, without knowing when, or if, she would be back. Even if she only needed to leave for a few hours to check on a friend, they deserved to know what was going on.

There was also the immediate question of what to actually do with them. It would be irresponsible to merely leave them alone, and while Lockheed was certainly a capable guardian, she would have felt much more comfortable if they also had a human sitter. They needed someone who could communicate with them directly if they needed anything.

She wasn't sure who she could call. Kitty was obviously out. Friends? None left residing in New York, to speak of. She had almost called Jean-Paul, before remembering his pending deportation. Teammates? She quickly struck out on both Remy and Cecilia—no one home. Logan, she wasn't sure would be appropriate, all things considered. And she didn't know what to say to Robert. She wasn't even sure how she felt about him not being in prison.

She internally ran through her sparse list of options as she shuttled the twins downstairs to the living room, before placing a call to one of the few remaining people she could think of that would even be awake at that hour.

* * *

**3.**

"Hell of a morning, right kiddo?"

"Buh."

It was about twenty minutes later when Jubilation arrived at the door of her small, two floor, house with her new son, Shogo Lee, awake and sulking in tow. Whether she was literally a dead being or not, the former mutant hadn't seemed like she was doing better in all of the ice and snow than the rest of them. She wasn't shivering or flinching at the bite of the outside air, as Xi'an herself did just at the thought of it, and her teeth weren't chattering as they might have been—but she still looked distinctly less comfortable and paler than usual.

At the very least, one would expect that having no heartbeat, and a stagnant pool of blood, would be undesirable in sub-zero climes. Without a pulse, her temperature just kept dropping along with the air around her. Even if it was technically 'survivable' for her, she didn't want to know what would happen were her blood to end up _actually_ freezing in her veins. Shogo was bundled up in her arms. He had a miniature woolen cap snuggled around his head, and Jubilation carried a satchel with his things, slung over her shoulder.

Xi'an's house was in North Salem, only the other side of town from Salem Center's Jean Grey School. In her experience it was not too far from the Harlem Line's Croton Falls station, but still only a few miles from the school, even without the benefit of the train. An easy trip to make on foot, though an undesirable one in present conditions—and one clearly neglected, given the unfamiliar red convertible that was now in her driveway, with its top propped up. It was usually a very short drive, so either it had taken Jubilation an inordinately uncommon time to get ready—not unlikely if the conditions of the side roads had relapsed—or she had been delayed looking for something.

"Logan's car?" Xi'an asked, closing the door behind her not-quite-a-friend. It would make sense, he had more than a few these days, and would not notice one absent for some time. Likely not until morning, if he noticed at all, and she didn't think he would hold it against Jubilation.

"Kitty's Jag. Heard she got sick of keeping it in Brian's garage, had it brought over last time the team was in the UK," she raised an eyebrow at Xi'an's disbelief. "What? I'll take care of it. If she's going to make me come out here at two in the morning, she's footing the bill."

"She just left her keys lying around the school?" It seemed unusually careless for someone who could just hide her things inside of a wall, where no one would ever find them.

"Headmistress' suite," she clarified. "Its got this cabinet that can't open, that everyone thinks is just a bar with fancy paneling. Kitty keeps a lot of her junk it in: SHIELD card, passports, gun safe, that kind of thing."

"You didn't break it opened, did you?"

"Nah. Someone would have heard me smashing furniture, I didn't want to make a scene. And, you know, no reason to tell the entire school where Kitty likes to hide her check book."

"So how did you get her keys?"

Jubilation just shifted her hold around her son to better support him with one arm, so that she could raise a hand in demonstration. She had a brief look of concentration on her face, before her palm seemed to bleach out into a colorless outline, slowly creeping along to spread to her fingers and wrist. It had turned into mist, as she usually described it, but the X-Club had given her a more complicated explanation about vaporizing her own particles and controlling them psychokinetically.

"I've gotten a lot better about this lately. It helps having someone to practice with," Jubilation said. She allowed an unguarded gleam of mischief to flash through her unnatural red eyes followed by, once she realized Xi'an had noticed, a twist of something that might have at once been embarrassment or guilt at getting caught breaking the rules. It was just a brief kind of near flush across her pixyish face that might have just been her reaction to being indoors and in a heated home. But there was also a self-consciousness to it, of the kind that a human lie detector would never miss, that suggested Jubilee was all too aware about being caught.

Great, Xi'an thought to herself. Another one. That was exactly what the world needed.

"Oh, here," Jubilation said, as she dug something out of her coat pocket, upon a few seconds of nonchalant rifling. She handed Xi'an several small prescription bottles in a slightly stretched handful. "I brought these, like you asked."

Xi'an had asked her to see if she could discretely collect Kitty's medication, which they could safely assume she had not taken recently, from her room—or Jean's room, as the state of things was. She didn't know if Kitty actually needed it, and Lockheed had never been good at judging, but it didn't hurt to be prepared. She was glad she hadn't had to reach out to Ororo or Logan for something like that. She liked them both, but they could be problematic when it came to personal issues. They weren't the people you want to share your nervous breakdowns with, she thought, while she set the small orange bottles on the coffee table.

Particularly not Ororo.

Logan was a good friend but, for his part, was also a disagreeable old man. Enough of a man-out-of-his-time that certain views he held could prove problematic. She suspected he still saw psychiatry as something that only existed for weak people. And didn't he once tell Kitty that therapy with Professor Xavier would 'break her spirit' and that she should just get over it herself? Given how much therapy it turned out Kitty actually needed, when she was in college, it would still have been terrible advice even if she hadn't been a scared teenager recovering from massive trauma.

Of course, Kitty seemed satisfied with the results. But on the other hand, it was still troubling advice for a teenage girl already caught up in the wake of her lifelong cycle of neurotic repression. Kitty's insistence, on brushing aside everything bad that had ever happened to her, hadn't done any favors either to her or to the people around her. She'd been in and out of anger management therapy, grief counseling, and general psychotherapy for years. She'd almost been expelled from university for snapping and attacking a classmate that set her off—and of course, it turned out that he may have deserved it, but Kitty didn't know that at the time. Only a telepath or an empath would know it, and there aren't many that she would let in to observe it, but Kitty's psyche was a bedlam.

Rahne was the first person to suggest that Kitty might be in need of, as unpleasant as it might be, some dedicated, intensive, help. They'd talked about it when they were all at the school together, all of the original New Mutants, under Scott and Emma. Rahne had picked up on, well, something, between the two of them. And she'd heard about Kitty's problems since leaving Scotland. She'd been worried about Kitty for a long time, especially after her delusional inability to accept that Doug Ramsey was dead and gone She hadn't painted a good picture of events for Xi'an: Kitty exhuming a corpse. Kitty convincing herself it was a fake. Dragging Rahne and Warlock on a waking parade through her memories, breaking and entering, even looking confused when things didn't line up with what wanted. Rahne had meant to mention it to Dr. MacTaggert, or Dr. Campbell, but nothing ever worked out so easily, and then she and Kitty had just lost touch when things fell apart.

And there was more to worry about than mundane, psychological, events and traumas.

How many times had Kitty had her memories or personality altered by magic? Or been drugged and brainwashed? Possessed? Influenced by Limbo demons? Not to mention being actually transformed into a cat at least twice. As far as anyone knew, Kitty had never actually tried to catch her breath and put her mind in order. Not since Chicago, at least. Scott and Emma had forced her into group counseling when Jean-Paul died, but she'd been evasive the entire time and hadn't finished. That was understandable, perhaps, what with time-traveling villainy to account for, mysterious resurrections, and being left for dead in interstellar space. But it didn't leave her any closer to being healthy.

Even if Lockheed turned out not to be overly worried, Kitty abruptly leaving the school to be alone for a few days wasn't the worst thing that could have happened. Just to keep her away from anyone liable to set off her temper at an inopportune time—like Ororo and her own brand of uniquely self-righteous foibles.

Speaking of personality conflicts.

Those two had been very close, years ago, and anyone could tell that they still tried. It looked honest, sincere, but there was nothing to do about drifting apart for so long like that. They restrained themselves to smiles and hugs if they ran into each other at work, but put them both together under one roof for more than a few days...

There had been more than one screaming tirade in the faculty break room.

They were more likely better off as friends from afar, linking up a few times a year and exchanging email updates. Neither one of them seemed like she could handle or relate to the other at all. Kitty just threw all of the ways she had changed into Ororo's face, and Ororo tried to force Kitty back into the clothes of the person she used to be in a shaded memory.

It was plainly typical of Kitty and her mother figures. She had probably collected more copies of those than she had her _Star Wars _comic books. Ororo, Dr. MacTaggert, Mariko, Madelyne, and (as disturbing as it was, in retrospect) Courtney Ross...

At least her comic books had dust covers.

It seemed like it was worse now that they had formed an informal team together. Ororo was one so determined to establish herself as the clear leader, that she would take any excuse to assert her authority over the others. Admittedly she had never known the older woman very well, but to Xi'an's unfamiliar eyes she truly came across as if she_ really _believed herself to be an honest-to-God druid. Anyone who lived a life that violated what was written in her auspices was wrong, and needed to be sternly disciplined with sanctimonious scolds.

While Jubilee finished shaking the snow off of her boots, Xi'an was already at work preparing the hot chocolate that Nga had insisted was so rightfully her's. The twins were in a vaguely half-asleep state on the coach, with two or three blankets shared unevenly between the both of them. The TV was on and the two were tiredly watching reruns of _Tom &amp; Jerry_ on the Boomerang channel. They were occasionally interrupted by the pendulous swing of Lockheed's tail, who lazed, curled into a loose spiral, on the top shelf of the entertainment center.

Xi'an could hear Jubilation from the kitchen, talking into her smart phone as quietly as possible, but still obviously yelling from her agitated tone and inflection. She was probably talking to Ororo, she guessed. She didn't think Logan or Henry would bother unless Kitty was late for work, and Rachel would not use a phone in the first place. And Logan, likely, would have just tried to search out Kitty for himself if he were not willing to leave her to her own business.

"No," Jubilee said, responding to an unheard question. "Not yet. I haven't heard back from Kitty either. I don't know, we talked a few days after the thing with Sublime? Yeah, I took off right after, remember? Sure I was a little worried too. No, I texted her. Before lunch.

"No, I wont text her again," she said, with more than a hint of disinterest. "I_ already_ texted her today. Once is enough, especially if you've been calling her anyway. If you don't lay off, you'll just annoy her and she'll take even longer.

"Jesus Stormy, I'm a grown woman, I'll worry about my friends on my own time. So is she, now that you mention it. Just go to sleep. She'll call you whenever she feels like calling you. I know you don't like it, but she's twenty-three years old. She can decide her own bed time, take as long as she want to look at her inbox, and put whoever she wants on ignore.

"Well maybe she didn't put you on ignore, maybe she just doesn't feel like answering—what do I know? Just look, if she was actually in like, real, immediate danger, Lockheed would know about it. Yeah, he's here with me. Logan's not worried either, is he? So no, I'm not taking this seriously, and no, I don't think you and Rae should either. Because there's nothing to take seriously. Single twenty-something punk-rocker-girl likes to stay out late and doesn't come home one weekend, world not exactly in shock. She probably just shacked up with someone. Last time, she was gone for months, and you didn't even know if she was alive until she turned up on her own."

She pulled the phone away for a moment, balancing it against her shoulder while she again shifted Shogo into a more comfortable position and rocked him slightly before settling him back into the crook of her arms. Xi'an wasn't sure, but she suspected that Ororo was talking uninterruptedly through that, and that Jubilation was just humoring it.

"I get it, you feel guilty about that, but just wait until tomorrow. If she doesn't show up for work, you can be worried," she said at length, when she leaned her head back into her phone. "Until then, you and Rae just find some other chew toy to snarl over."

She must have hung up there, because a few seconds later Jubilation was entertaining a sleepy pair of twins during a commercial break.

"Would you believe those two?" Jubilee said, rolling her eyes at the sky as she saw her. "First it was Karima—and yeah, ok, I can see how, like, orders to murder a teammate might create a power struggle. But then they fought over who got to save a plane from crashing, and now they're fighting over who gets to be in charge of the most X-Men? What's up with that?"

"Its nothing new," Xi'an considered. "We've always had too many personalities, haven't we? And now we don't have Scott or the Professor, or even Magneto, to keep things in order. Logan wont either, he's not that kind of leader."

"Hey, he knows what he's doing. He kept your team safe, didn't he?"

"Yes. That's not what I meant—I don't think that he isn't a good leader," she said, while handing over a hot coffee mug. "He can lead a team, and I trust him, but he can't think politically and keep other leaders in check. He's a captain, not a general, I suppose. They all go their own way, without someone guiding them. Just look at what Henry's gotten up to without supervision."

"Isn't that supposed to be Kitty's job? Supervising the personnel issues?" Jubilee asked, after taking a small sip, closing her eyes as she felt the capillaries in her throat begin to that out.

"I don't really know anymore. I thought she was good at running the school. She seemed to be enjoying her work. But then she just stepped down, to regular staff, and gave her position to Ororo."

"What happened to them anyway? They seemed like they used to be friends, than they were always shouting at each other, and now its just... I don't know, cold?" Jubilee had once been jealous of Kitty's relationships with Logan and Storm, like she had edged her out just by being there first, but that was before she had come to know her. You needed to see Kitty's half of that picture before you realized that the three of them were just faking it. They didn't know each other at all. They just hurt each other while trying to prove themselves wrong. "I mean, they pretend they get along, but its more like going through the motions."

"They did used to be friends," Xi'an said. "Did you ever meet Seth?"

"Which one was that, the asshole that tried to kill them in space?"

"Yes. Kitty had a string of lousy boyfriends that she used to throw in Ororo's face, were you there for that?"

"A few. Yeah, it was when she was at college, after we all got our powers back. What was up with that? I knew she was a screw 'em and leave 'em type, but that was the only time I've seen her parade around in front of everyone like that."

"She told me, Ororo told her, that she should start thinking about 'settling down.'"

"Whoa."

"Yes. I think that's why she didn't tell anyone she was still alive."

"She told Logan. Probably Xavier too—he always refused to use Cerebro to find her. I think she just left Stormy in the dark for revenge."

"Oh, that. You mean—?"

"Yep. Dallas. Its been eight years and she's still paying for that one."

"The entire team died, to be fair."

"Our great leader, everyone," Jubilee raised her cup in salute.

Xi'an paused for a moment, staring down at her cup into the swirl of a shrunken marshmallow, already half dissolved. She didn't hear Jubilation's question until the second time it was asked.

"So? How is she?" Jubilee asked

She was really asking Lockheed, who just jerked a look at Xi'an, while swinging his tail back and forth.

"Lockheed wasn't clear. Its still hard for me to understand him. He just knows she's having a bad day, and I think that it was time for him to leave her alone. She sounds like she's ok, I think she just had too much..."

"Too much everything? Yeah, all of your friends running in and out of their jobs and holding you with the bag, when they're not trying to for-real kill each other, will do that."

Yes—that was probably why she was avoiding them. All of the little inter-office frustrations were too close in the past, and the tough love type of conflict resolution that most of the X-Men preached had never worked well for people like Kitty. Kitty's first instinct when stressed, if she didn't ignore it entirely and pretend it didn't exist, was usually to start punching things until they stop moving. You couldn't guilt her into doing things she didn't want to do, because deep down, she didn't really care. She might want to be needed and to be appreciated, but she could live perfectly well with not being liked, as long as the noise went away.

If you were very lucky, she might only do something juvenile—like phasing Logan's liquor cabinet and letting all of his whiskey seep down into the cracks of the Earth—and then move on. But she had never done well with authority figures, especially when it comes to female authority figures. Maybe it was a mother complex, or maybe it was just another little gift from Emma Frost's days as the White Queen.

Add that to her routine problem of toxic relationships with older women, in general. The healthy thing to do would be to try to correct what she was doing wrong. Xi'an wouldn't even know where to go about untangling that, but there had to be something to do. Trying harder to find common ground with her mother and Ororo? Keeping suspicious, untrustworthy, people at a distance? Only Kitty, as usual, had to be special. Her solution seemed to be trying out more toxic relationships, but with men instead.

Maybe she thought they'd all cancel out, in the end.

"Thank you for coming," Xi'an said. "I don't think I've thanked you yet, for coming out here so late, in weather like this. I'm sorry for dragging you into my family problems, but Samuel and Danielle are still in California, working, and no one knows where Rahne or Laura are."

Of course, normally when she needed to leave the twins for a night, she could just call Kitty. She had watched them for almost two weeks during the incident with Da'o. But that was not an option, that night, for the obvious reasons.

Jubilee just shrugged, while taking a small sip.

"Hey, she's my family too, so don't worry about it. I might not have been part of your New Mutants club, but ever since she got back from Muir, she's been like one of those bratty step-sisters that you can't wait to get rid of. Only more like one of those cousins that you actually miss when they're gone."

When they were finished and the twins had become lost to their program, she spent a few minutes showing Jubilation around the house, and showing her where everything was, in case she needed anything.

It was really a fairly small house for one with two floors, Xi'an reflected to herself.

She could definitely afford a larger one those days, but it suited three people and the occasional guest just fine, and moreover it was her first house and held a special place for that alone.

"I'm not sure how long I'll be gone. If anything..."

"Don't worry. I've got Kitty's credit cards too. I'll take the kids out to breakfast if you're not back."

"Thank you again," Xi'an said, as they finished. "For all of your help."

There was a lazy wave in response, from the younger woman, as she settled back down into the couch with her son.

"Don't worry about it. She'd do the same for me."

"Don't let it flatter you too much if it does," she admitted. "Its a problem Katherine needs to work on. She's always been a misanthropic narcissist. She'd let herself die for a stranger, if it let her feel just a bit more superior."

"Maybe. But she did still save my life once. We were on the run from Viper together. She was cracking into pieces the whole time. She couldn't even hold herself together, I'm not even sure she still knew who she was after what happened to her, and she still saved me."

That's what she does, isn't it? Xi'an wondered. That's how you let her weave herself into your life. That's how it always starts. She'll help you through your most desperate times, and entitle herself to use you as an emotional plaything, until you're too tangled up to notice when you've reached the end.

"If she did it because she's my friend, then that's great," Jubilee continued. "I'm glad to help. If she did it for herself, then consider me paying it back."

Sometimes paying her back was all Kitty let you have. But Xi'an just let Jubilee leave it at that.

"Do you want me to go?"

She was about to ask for clarification, when she heard the echo of uncertain, unspoken, thoughts. She heard what Jubilation had inferred for herself, strongly enough for a telepath to hear even by accident, discarded quickly and discretely enough that Xi'an knew she wouldn't actually say it.

"I could leave Shogo here. See what's up," Jubilee offered aloud. "Maybe help her get drunk or kick her in the head, if she needs it."

"No... no thank you. Lockheed wants me to go. And I've already made arrangements."

Jubilee considered for a moment.

"Alright. If that's how you like it."

"I'm not sure about that, but its all there is."

"Be careful," Jubilee reminded her.

"What do you mean?" Xi'an asked, uncertain.

"How long did it take for Bobby to go crazy? Or Mystique? And then Kitty pulled that thing right out of her and had it for who-knows-how-long."

"You don't think she can handle it? She seemed fine." Or at least as well as anyone could be.

"Shan..." she begun slowly. "It only took Nova five seconds to convince Kitty to free her, and help her kill her friends."

"She told me it was three years. One of perfection, and then two of losing everything."

"Inside, sure. But in the real world? Hisako and Ruth were there. Ruth was watching the entire thing. It only took her a few seconds to process that—to decide she could kill her team and her students. And then Madripoor? Viper's wedding? Creed told her that he liked her style, after she dropped a guy off a building. Did she ever tell you what Matsuo did to her?"

"Yes. The Hand tried to do the same as what they did to Logan and Jean-Paul."

"They didn't try. It worked. On her anyway. She shut it down on Logan and Creed—they were there too. But it worked on her. It just didn't affect her like it should have. Shan, Kitty's not all the way there. You know that, right?" And she wasn't talking about the depression or anger issues.

It was tempting to go in for the simple explanations, Xi'an agreed. But simplicity was all too often just a useful road map, and it left out the subtler details.

"Its just her wiring. She's just different from us. Believe me, I've been in her head. We lived together for a year, and I had plenty of opportunities. She's different, and she's difficult, but she's not crazy."

"How can you be so sure?"

"Because I know her. Do you think I'd trust her with my children if I didn't?" She caught a flinch of something. "Oh. I'm sorry. Is that it? Is it your son?"

"I... I don't know," Jubilation admitted. "I didn't think it would change things. We didn't want it to change things."

"Logan, then?"

"Yeah. I love him. But..." she trailed off and sighed a out an unnecessary breath.

"But you don't know if you would trust him alone with your son."

"Its not like he doesn't have history. He'd _never_ hurt me, I know that. He's proven that. But Shogo? He's my son, but he's also just another kid. I know he cares about him, but not as much as he cares about me."

"How much is enough?"

"I just don't know. But Kurt and Kitty didn't make the cut—he's tried to kill both of them. Back when Apocalypse had him. I'm sure he cares more about them, than some kid he doesn't know. Damn it. I don't know. I feel the same way about everyone around me but its like I have to look at them differently now. I mean, how do you know who you can trust with your kids, even out of your friends?"

"I'm sorry, but I don't really know either. Experience? I'd seen Kitty, Danielle, and Jean-Paul with the twins so many time, that it became obvious. With you? I've seen you with your son. Its different with infants, but you still seem like you know what you're doing. Maybe that's a bad reason to trust people. But its all I have."

They parted ways after a few more moments of mutual awkwardness. It was easy, when you've been an X-Man for approaching a decade, to be reminded of how abnormal you were. There was always something more to be awkward about.

"So... you and Kitty?" Jubilee said.

"It wasn't obvious?"

"It was obvious that there was...what'cha'call'it?"

"Unresolved sexual tension?"

"Yeah that. But Kitty? Who doesn't she? Women, men, dragons—"

"_Yreah!_" sounded Lockheed.

"—maybe Doop—"

"_Nreah_." Lockheed deflated.

"—at least one alien artificial intelligence."

"House plants," Xi'an offered.

"Really?"

"Krakoa likes her. He likes to take control of the plants in her office and make flowers."

They ran out of things to say in short order, and let it all drift apart. It was a welcome awkwardness, at least, since it was already very late.

She slipped on a jacket, and zipped it up over her sweater. Leather usually wasn't to her tastes, or hadn't been, but it had a fur lining and kept heat well. It fit adequately enough, though it was a little too long in the sleeves, as it had been bespoke tailored for a woman with slightly longer arms than Xi'an had. At least it made her wrists feel less cold, the way that the sleeves fell over the backs of her mittens. She twisted on a scarf as well, piled her hair into a wool tuque, and pocketed the pill bottles Jubilee had given her before saying a quick goodbye (and good night) to the twins—and their sitter—and their dragon.

She dialed a private number on her cellphone, only after she was outside and had trudged well outside of what she guessed to be Jubilation's hearing range.

It connected after four rings, just before the fifth could start.

"Hello, and good evening. Its me again. Yes, I'm ready."

The reply was short, brief, and trying just a little too hard to sound insincere and uncaring.

"Because you owe me," Xi'an reminded her.

* * *

**4.**

Intellectually, Xi'an knew that Illyana's stepping discs weren't exactly the Stargate, but she still expected to go flying out the other end every time she stepped through one. So she was a little disappointed when she just walked out calmly through the other side, into a foot and a half of unpacked snow in a dimly lit city alley, as if she had done no more than step through a door. She was disappointed, just like she was a little more disappointed last time, and still more disappointed the time before that. Stepping discs used to be far more exciting. You never knew if you'd end up in a volcano in Indonesia by accident—or if you'd even be in the right decade. But now, with time gone by and control built up, certainty had increased and expectation had gone down. These days, Illyana didn't even have to use Limbo as a way point anymore. It was just like having a colleague who could create snow and realizing you found it more annoying than fantastical.

"Are you sure you don't want something more specific than just 'Chicago'?" Illyana asked, trying her hardest not to look like she was desperate to do more. She could teleport the both of them to whatever hellhole Kitty had decided to drown herself in. She could put on her Soul Armor and go rescue Kitty from the night—Xi'an was sure it had crossed Illyana's mind. She could just steal Kitty away in her sleep and get her away from that school, and partition an impassible barrier of time and space against her past, whether she wanted to escape or not. She could create some fantasy land for herself and her friend in Limbo, and park her there until they grew old and died, and ready to start over again somewhere else.

She wondered why Illyana hadn't, nor was it really something she could ask. She didn't know Illyana well enough, and she wasn't sure if even Illyana knew Illyana well enough.

But even without knowing the sorceress as intimately as the other New Mutants, it usually wasn't that hard to guess what she was thinking. Illyana was a very expressive person, in the end. She had never quite realized that reading minds encompassed far more than just mutant psionics, and yet she only guarded her mind against magic and extrasensory perceptions—but never the more mundane things. Notwithstanding that she was unassailable to telepathy, she was also an open book to the people around her, or at least to anyone who knew what to look for.

Everything you needed to know was written into her face, whether she was talking about Kitty, or only watching her from afar. No matter how angry she tried to sound, or how coldly her silence held, or how dismissively she carried herself: her frown was still a scream. She was shouting so often, doing everything she could to be heard, and was only ignored for her labors.

Why don't you love me anymore?

Why can't I fix things?

Why wont you tell me what to do, to make it right?

Illyana's desperation for Kitty's affection was so obvious that it wasn't just politeness at work when you pretended to not notice. Or maybe that wasn't true—maybe no one else had noticed. After all, what she saw in Illyana wasn't far removed from what she saw in herself the first week after things fell apart. She had seen it so often, it would be hard to ever mistake it.

But at least, for that night, Xi'an didn't really know where she was going. Not exactly. There was nowhere else for Illyana to take her and, without pretense, a depressing reunion could be brushed aside for a while yet. She counted that as a victory of circumstance. The last thing any of them needed was for Kitty to be drunk while Illyana was haphazardly reaching out to her.

"I'll figure it out, one way or another," Xi'an said, after considering whether she could use the extra help, or even the company. "There are only so many bars, even in this city. And I don't expect to have to go through all of them."

She politely declined the offer when Illyana suggested she could pick her up, whenever she was ready to go.

She and Kitty could find their own way back home.

Before she could leave, Illyana drew her Soulsword. It was born, as always, out of a crackling spark of magical lightning. It was not manifest from a conjured nothing, but emerged from Illyana's heart, out of a fissure of blue light that may have been a small stepping disc of its own.

"You'll want this," Illyana offered, before casually tossing it at Xi'an. It went blade first, but turned over on itself in a smooth arc—the bleak pommel was pointed at her as it reached her hand.

* * *

**5.**

As her hand closed around the grip of the Soulsword, she thought she could hear the whirring, grinding, noise of steel being gnawed upon by the jaws of the universe: crunching, twisting, and crumpling until all was reshapen. One moment it was tremendous—monstrously unwieldy—as it had become in Magik's recent adventures; and then, in an instant later, it was the thin, more elegant blade of their shared youth. It was bare of ornamentation and extraneous trimmings, having become just a normal sword, with a thin lemniscate twist of wire for a crossguard.

Of that space observed between the moments, occupied by compressing and smoothing and sharpening, Xi'an was sure she had only imagined it.

She regarded the warmth of the surfacing blue fire, on the other hand, as it flickered out to leave only chilled silver and steel, and was given pause to no such certainty. Illyana's flame was one that had never burned her, or anyone else so far as she knew, but she didn't doubt that things would be different were something that did not belong to fall afoul of its interest. That brief bloom of intensity, whatever magic it was, did nothing to heat her in the brisk night air. Instead of a tangible flare radiating through her arm to sear her heart, it was more like to the comforting feeling of Illyana's own best intentions. But then that moment was cracked, broken, as soon as it was framed; and before it could transition from fancy to memory, the warmth was gone.

Did it have some peculiar meaning, that she should be equipped hold Illyana Rasputina's soul in her hands—something that only Illyana and Kitty were supposed to be capable of? Or did it mean nothing at all, other than Illyana wanted it so—and, except for once, Illyana Rasputina always got what she wanted.

"Its the only object in this universe that can hurt her when she's phased," Illyana reminded her, and the look of unabashed perniciousness she wore at that moment was the best counterargument to Illyana not knowing of her own tells. No one could be that unsettling and not know it.

"I don't need it." It was entirely possible that she might become tempted to knock Kitty around a little, as Jubilation suggested, but she wasn't going to need to _cut_ her.

But Illyana just laughed joyously, as if at a particularly obtuse woman had just sold her soul to her—and sometimes it was just hard to understand her at all.

"Yekaterina could, of course, just rip it out of your hands, along with the bones you hold it with," Illyana says, at her most most inverecund. "It's just a gift, for your own piece of mind. And besides, you never know when a gift might come in handy."

A moment later the sword in Xi'an's hands had safely tucked itself away, through no action of her own. It went to wherever it was that magic swords made from a little girl's soul go, when they aren't needed—probably hidden away somewhere between _L'Étranger_ and her colloquial French. Illyana, for her part, just left through another stepping disc; but only after assuring her that she could merely jaunt into the future and take her sword back, and there would be no need to worry about returning it.

At times like those, it was not so hard for her to understand how two people so inaccessible from one another could have once been friends. They both had more demons chasing them than could fit into a single hell; and they were like of a kind, in how they carried on. They both thought the people around them existed for their entertainment.

* * *

**6.**

Xi'an made a token effort with that old mainstay of telepaths everywhere, not really expecting it to work. Or maybe it was just something that Emma had devised on her own—but either way it was a useful trick. Psychic defenses for non-telepaths always focused on disciplining their thoughts into order, which, among other things, made it more difficult to track them as they moved in crowds. Emma had shown her a way around that. She could scan through an entire population, looking for any one thing that stood out and marked the target as obviously different.

It worked best when using language. If her quarry were foreign to their surroundings, she could just identify the comparatively smaller subset of the population that was thinking in the wrong language, and continue thinning out the results from there, using some other uncommon factor.

Kitty, as someone trilingual in English, Japanese, and Russian, should have provided her with a simple starting point. When she wasn't paying attention (as when she was angry, or struggling to become plastered), the structure of her thoughts erred towards becoming a code-switched nightmare—even ignoring the odd word in German, French, Hebrew, or alien languages, thrown in there with the wrong syntax. Even without language, the basic cultural mores informing her thoughts seemed to slide between middle-class European-American and extreme traditionalist Japanese. And then there was a lifetime of adolescent assimilation, whether it was habits picked up from boarding schools in Westchester and the home counties, adventures with alien royalty, wacky games with Dracula's children and the fairy courts, or just spending too much time palling around with scary people.

As simple as her wants might be beneath it all, there was clearly no one else quite like Kitty Pryde. The problem was, of course, that Kitty could phase—which required Xi'an to follow her own experience, and not Emma's or the Professor's, if she wanted results.

She found herself on her way again, having struck out the first time (of several) at Dylan's bar—to be expected, if inconvenient. Whether out of rampant, unchecked, paranoia, or purely unrestrained egomania, Kitty likely expected at least one person to come looking for her. If she wanted to make things difficult, she would hardly be down the street from her own apartment, less a bar that she used to work in.

Even Julian could have found her at the Belles, and that boy had mornings where he couldn't find his own hands.

It was eleven after three according to her phone, after meandering in from the fifth bar she tried, when she finally found her. Kitty was as notoriously difficult as ever to track down, something made all the more difficult by how stubbornly linear most telepaths tended to be. They were all so used to bending thoughts and reality with their imagination, that they were lost when it came to dealing with someone who could not be bludgeoned into the mold so easily. It never occurred to anyone that you could track, not just by eminence, but also by absence.

Kitty could render herself invisible to telepaths by phasing; she didn't even have to become completely intangible—she could just let the reflections cast by her thoughts slip away, as impossible to take hold of as her particles themselves. And even without the benefit of her mutation, she knew how to trick people into reading her surface thoughts; along with the facades she put forward for the benefit of others, to set them at ease. Telepaths who scanned over her mind would usually find whatever garbage was drifting along the surface, and pass her over, not even knowing she was there.

The people who were with her were not so lucky. They only had their own minds to think with, and Xi'an could be in a dozen at once, seeing through their eyes, hearing with their ears, and feeling with the air on their skin. Even with all of Kitty's hiding-in-plain-sight 'you-don't-notice-me' ninja expertise, at the very least the bartender was going to know if she was there or not.

She was dressed much more lightly than she should have been—even unfairly so, as far was Xi'an was concerned. Unfair because, Xi'an thought, it was another transparent example of Kitty going out of her way to be the buzz-kill worst of both worlds.

If you're not going to dress weather appropriately, she thought, you should at least go back to wearing backless shirts so I can stare at your traps while you ignore me.

(Mmm. No! Bad looking!)

All of that hair would be in the way anyway, she supposed. Kitty hadn't had it cut since... before. She had been straightening it of late, but for that night there was just a wavy clutter of loose curls covering most of her back. It could not even be called an 'artful' mess except in the sense of _I put virtually no effort into anything I do, but everything just falls into place on its own, because I'm special like that._

It occurred to her that this had been the first time in months that she hadn't seen Kitty in a suit, or at least an office shirt and a nice skirt. She was just wearing a pair of washed out white jeans, long enough to crumple up at her feet, and a pair of shirts. A cotton shirt with long sleeves, and a looser one tossed over over it. It was the same thing she might normally wear, even when Robert Drake hadn't just frozen all of the world over in a fit of self-directed pique.

That was typical for Kitty.

Xi'an had never been able to decide: did she not feel the cold the same way as normal people did, or did she only not care? Even if the latter, she must have been fairly well acclimatized to it. Logan's idea of martial training had evidently involved throwing her off a cliff, into a freezing river, and making her swim for ten straight kilometers.

Kitty hadn't turned around, or done anything else to acknowledge that one of her friends was now standing in the room with her. Not even a slight tense of the muscles in her shoulders or neck. Regardless, Xi'an knew, and if only from experience, that the younger woman knew very well that she was there.

She was just choosing to ignore her, for the time being, so that she could continue to play with her smart phone. The dark polish had only started to chip around the ends of her nails. She still kept them short enough that the sound of tiny fingers tapping away at a touch screen was at a minimum. She had just rejected a call, and sent it back to voice mail.

She was honestly a little surprised that Kitty hadn't already turned her phone off.

Except not really; she, perversely, probably liked it even as it annoyed her.

After a moment of nothing, or maybe of waiting for something and giving up in failure, Kitty sighed inaudibly. She waved the bartender over with her phone in hand, while shifting her weight on the bar stool, so that she could slip it into her pocket in the same motion. When she was done, she made a show of raising one arm and twisting her hand around to point behind her, in Xi'an's direction. Sometimes, Kitty looked like she was dancing even when she was sitting still.

Perhaps she was bitter that her ballet career never took off.

"Hey everyone! Look who just showed up. Its Shan Coy Manh! Pull up a stool, Shan."

Xi'an sat down next to her. Even while turned to look directly at her, she could just barely see enough of Kitty's tilted profile to look her in the eyes. Her bangs were a little uneven—though, that could have just been the manner in which her head was turned and how she had pushed it aside—and were almost in the way. More distracting were all of the piercings; it wasn't that she had two rings on one side of her nose or a few more through one eyebrow and a tiny stud in the other, or all of the little ones on her ears that her hair was covering up. What was distressing was that Kitty had all of that metal in her skin when it was negative ten centigrade outside—because _of course she did_. In a weird way, it was nice to see that Kitty Pryde's ex-boyfriend could throw as big a tantrum as humanly possible, freeze an entire planet and terrorize the Thunder God, but she would still stay out late and dress however she wanted when he was done.

But Xi'an felt colder just looking at her.

She could feel the creep of hypochondriacal frostbite just from wondering whether Kitty was wearing her tongue stud.

"Who'd you leave with the kids?"

"Jubilation," Xi'an said, before nodding at the bartender, as he slipped a glass in front of her.

"I guess she has experience lately, but a newborn isn't really the same as a pair of ten year olds."

"I'm sure she'll be fine. They can take of themselves for a few hours, and Lockheed is with them as well."

Kitty just made a noncommittal noise.

"And she was the best option for an emergency sitter," Xi'an continues. "Dani and Sam are on a mission. Remy and Cecilia were both out or asleep, and Jean-Paul—"

"Is no longer welcome south of the forty-ninth parallel. Yeah. I know how that one feels."

"Isn't there anyone you could call for him?"

"Not really. He has his own legal team. Nothing I can do for him that they can't. Not unless he wants to do what I did." Which was to indenture herself to SHIELD for... actually, kind of forever, even if they were leaving her alone. "He might be able to get away with just joining the Avengers—not so hard for X-Men these days."

Kitty just lazily flicked a wave of hair out of her eyes and slumped over the bar. She had dark brown hair, black eyes, and fairly dark olive skin—much darker than Xi'an was at least. She was average height. Completely ordinary, and someone who used to obsess over it and wish she were a blonde like her best friend, or had a lighter complexion like her classmates. She was had always been too uncompromising in her own skin to want that she could change it, instead just growing more comfortable in her own perceived imperfections, or at least better at hiding it.

She was very fit, but because of the narrowness of her shoulders and the width of her hips, it was hard to really notice, at a glance, how much muscle definition she actually had. Even though Kitty was fit in the sense that required years of obsession to attain, but she still lacked distinguishing features—in that sense. Still tiny enough to be unassuming, but not as short as she looked—more of an average height. The same height as Xi'an herself, really. Kitty used to think of herself as forgettably plain, because of that, but it wasn't really a fair assessment. Xi'an herself had always thought her gorgeous, but gorgeous in a way drawn from one of the broadest palettes of human traits. She could be anyone, from almost anywhere.

It was only when you actually get to know her, as a person beneath the anonymity, that you start to recognize how alien from the rest of the human experience that she could be.

And frankly, she wished Kitty would stop getting in for work, with just her favorite dark plum lipstick and some eye shadow, and making sure everyone knew she didn't wear makeup. It was giving some of the girls in her classes a complex. And, as someone who grew up around Ororo, Madelyne, Carol, Rogue, Emma, and Elisabeth, and all of the self-image woes and delusions of inadequacy that implied, she must have known better. Yes, Kitty, she could have said. You never wear foundation or concealer, but your skin isn't an actual tangible physical object in the first place, so try shutting your mouth around impressionable teenagers.

"Kitty, are you ok?" Xi'an asked, instead.

"Yeah. Yeah I'm fine." She shook her head against the bar, just shy of tussling her hair, before looking back up and peering out of the corner of her right eye. "Things have been crap but... no, its cool. I just needed some time away for a while—sorry about wasting your night like this."

"Its fine. I was worried about you, so I don't mind. Its not like I'm not used to running out at night to do something stupid—and this is a much less inconvenient waste of my time than our last emergency."

Xi'an took a sip of her tonic water—Kitty used to claim that Dylan's bar stocked it just for her. She accepted that as the final proof that Kitty was a liar.

"Still... thanks, I guess," and she looked a little too pleased with herself at it all. She might have been annoyed that someone interrupted her pity party, but she also looked like she wanted to break out the smiles, and burst into song at the ego tease she was getting. "I don't know, I just needed to get drunk. Kind of. Its been a messed up few months for everyone, right? You know, Phoenix related stress and aftershock. Everyone just up and abandoning us, and our students, so they could run off and join in. Be a party to the terminal stupidity of our depopulated little sub-tribe of the human race. And then that crap with Bobby just hit things over the edge."

"Breaking up with him?"

"No...? Really, Xi'an? That's what you think of me? No. It was... uh, let's just say that ripping Apocalypse's heart out of Mystique's chest wasn't... easy." She exhaled languorously. It made Xi'an want a cigarette. "So, speaking of, _did you_ hear about me and Bobby?"

"You broke up? I heard."

"We're 'taking a break.' His idea. He actually told me he did it 'to protect me.' From him, if you can believe it. And now _you_'re here, of all people. How's that for irony."

Kitty took the opportunity to belt back her glass, and Xi'an found herself fighting the urge to roll her eyes as she watched her top herself off from the bottle.

"But you're ok with it?"

"Oh, yeah. We kept it pretty casual. It was a shitty way for him to handle things, but I don't really mind." It did kind of come out of nowhere, but Kitty had to admit she was expecting them to stop soon anyway. Honestly the most annoying thing about it was that he thought about breaking up at all. They hung out, and sometimes slept together, but what was there to break up?

"Sorry, I'd just thought of when Lorna showed up..."

"Well, I'll grant you it was kind of inconsiderate for him to act that way when I was _right there_." She paused for a beat. "I'm just not planning on getting back together with him, is all."

"That's fine."

"You sound like you don't believe me."

"No, I do."

"Then what? You just don't care?"

"Kitty, it just doesn't matter. You don't care about any of the people you date anyway. They're all interchangeable to you."

"I care about plenty of people," Kitty said, dismissively.

Xi'an imagined it was meant to sound defensive, but the veneer of apathy lining her words was a bit too thick for that. Most of the time, Kitty cared more about her own autonomy than she did about the lives of the people around her, or even about her own welfare. She would gladly walk out of your life forever, just so that she could prove it to herself—prove that she had the total control and freedom to do whatever she wanted. She had been dumped before, but (except for that infamous first time) only when she wanted to be. There was probably a part of her that was seething that Robert didn't give her advance warning so that she could preempt him.

"I know you do, but you always go about things the wrong way. You might care, but you still don't care enough. Not enough for it to hurt. Not about Peter, or the other Peter, or Rachel, or Doug, or Rigby, and especially not Bobby. "

"How much do I have to care before its 'enough?' Do you think its _easy_? The ones I _really_ cared about are all gone, Shan. Everyone is dead. Illyana, Maddie, Kurt, Xavier, Moira, Mariko, my father, my whole damned family. They all die, and even when they come back, I've _still_ lost them forever. We just smile and lie to each other and say everything's alright, and we pretend we're still the people that we used to be. And I may have Lockheed, but love him or not, he's still a weird alien dragon and doesn't exactly understand why I feel the way I feel. He doesn't _get _why I'm screwed up, why I've b_een_ _screwed_ up all this time. He doesn't _get_ that, Shan, or why he can't help me. And I don't even know I'm doing anymore."

"So, I take it, you haven't talked to anyone about it?"

"No, who would I even talk to? I mean, I went to see Piotr. But, he has his own problems, doesn't he? I might be selfish, but I'm not _that_ selfish."

"What about Rachel? She's supposed to be—"

"Supposed to be, sure. But she's not. Word of advice, Shan? Never get too close to a telepath. They are _all_ the same. They always think that they're the only ones who can read people. She's Kate Pryde's friend, not mine, and she'll be pissed at me until the day she dies for not being her," she let herself grow a little more distant from it before continuing. "I could see everything I needed to see just from her eyes. Not that its hard to figure out that the person right in front of you is always looking through you. That every second you're together she's really with someone else."

"But you _are_ Kate Pryde," Xi'an reminded her.

"No I'm not." She, said, discontentedly. She stared down into her drink, as if to fixate at something at the bottom of the glass, or beneath it. "I used to think I could... But I'm not, Shan. I know I'm not. I only just look like her. I don't even particularly sound like her."

"You have her memories, don't you?"

"That doesn't matter. Why should it matter? I have a lot of peoples' memories, and I'm not any of those women. I have whole lifetimes worth memories of things that never happened to me—some of them never happened to anyone at all. I've had to trip through most of my life, every waking step, always questioning which of my thoughts really originated from me. Memories are just bullshit. They're easy, in comparison."

She lazily traced only half of an idle ring, about the edge of her glass, before pulling away.

"And then there's you, Shan. What do you even want from me? Why are_ you_ here? Three days later? Because it actually _did _hurt, Shan. It hurt because that stupid thing _showed me_, it reminded me, of everyone I'd already lost. Dead, or in jail, or just _different_. And then, you just show up? You, of all people? While I'm drinking myself under the bar."

And that was why, even though Xi'an hadn't been that worried about her, she was glad that she decided to blow a night on this. Kitty was one who could always benefit from just having someone sitting with her to moderate her, when she was really down, and edging closer to the risk afforded by her crazier thoughts. Just to make sure she always knew when she was being ridiculous. Otherwise she'd just see only what she expected to see, twist everything else, and brainwash herself into believing in abject stupidity.

Just like her old delusions about Warlock.

Or like her obsession with the Genoshan camera footage. Her belief that if she watched her father die, burning alive a million times, she might find some hidden message underneath it all.

And like the idea that she had run out of people to love.

"Kitty, I'm _only_ here because _I'm _your friend," she said. She was staring right at her as she said it, imploring her to believe her.

But Kitty could see every strand of emotion as it projected through the intrinsic twitches in the tiny muscles of her face. It was almost worth laughing at it all.

Figures, Kitty thought to herself. That just figured.

She wished more than anything that she was so drunk that she could have missed it.

She took a breath to move past it, hardly catching the choke in her throat before it could form. But then she just leaned over, one bar stool to the other, draping herself over her friend in only half of a hug.

"No, you're my _best_ friend, did you know that?" she said in a strained voice, into Xi'an's ear, trying to keep her pitch so that it would not carry to the other patrons. "If I ever needed proof of that, you're the one that cared enough to come and find me. Not Rachel or Ororo. And I need my best friend right now. I need you so bad, Shan. Its like, everything got a few degrees warmer when you walked through that door, because now my best friend is here for me, when I don't have anyone else. If that's really why you're here, anyway. So why are you here, Shan? Because if you think this is your chance for something else, something better than being my best friend, then you can go_ fuck off_, and never come back."

As she pulled back with that strained last exclamation there was a flash of rage in Kitty's cool black eyes, and again Xi'an found herself thinking back to that last moment, only a few days ago, when Kitty grabbed the Death Seed in her hand—and of the blatantly unstable hate that had sunken in her eyes before she tore it out of Mystique's heart. She recalled the obvious tremors in voice and demeanor, and how close Kitty had looked to having a psychotic break right there on the iced-over street. It perhaps didn't say much for her preexisting mental state, that it had affected her so swiftly.

Not that Kitty needed to be possessed by an evil alien artifact to be a bitch. She put on a good face for strangers, but most of the time, she still didn't need any help at all. She could do that just fine on her own, whether or not she was in her own right mind, and with or without an imperative provocation.

It was hard for any telepath to live with someone for more than a year without getting to know them fairly well. Kitty could have blocked her out indefinitely, and kept her guard up relentlessly through the hours; which she did, and for a long time, at that. Even without the constant static of her mutation, letting her flicker in and out of substance—often without even noticing—it was almost impossible for a telepath to read anything that she did not want to be read. The tapestry woven of her mind and her thoughts, was more like a scattered beam of light, stretched across a million splinters of glass.

But eventually she stopped blocking, and even if she didn't exactly let Xi'an in and leave herself vulnerable, she did at least give her a better feel for her actual authentic personality beneath all of the make-believe facades and self-delusional filth. It wasn't surprising to her, having been given a free pass through that first protective barrier, that Kitty worked so carefully to be on guard and put people at ease. Kitty's mind was a labyrinthine mess, and she kept too many scary secrets for too many scary people—and the times were often enough when she could be rather unsettling herself.

It wasn't just that Kitty liked her privacy; she liked being thought of, but only in a specific way, by the people around her. She wanted to be regarded in ways not conducive to her friends figuring out that sharing her mind could be like stumbling through the deeper wastes of the Earth, and getting lost in a yawning abyss. Without Kitty to guide them along, a mind reader could wander for an eternity between the empty spaces linking her real thoughts and memories, from the dreams and other memories, and the blinding momentary flares of the what-might-have-been.

That may have been why Kitty happened to fall within the particular boundary of being a spectacularly mean drunk. She had more than enough misanthropy and hatred weighing her down, and more than enough disused space for it to linger in wait, before it started to intrude upon better things. But then after a few years she could stumble across it all, and realize she had a hoarder's nightmare in her brain, with no extra room for new things.

Hoarding really did describe what she did. Even with those pictures she kept—one for each dead friend on a pinboard in her room. But she never took them down, even when her friendscame back. She had an endless pile of waste that she refused to let go of. She held her grudges forever, and never stopped building on them, and it took far too little inducement for her to stop caring about hiding from the people around her. There always came a day when she let it all spill out, and on to the streets, and then cleaning it up became someone else's problem.

Fortuitously, it had always taken working effort, thanks to the benefits of a mutated metabolism, for her to actually become impaired; but she only needed just a little bit of help to tip her over that thin edge between seething and actual self-sabotage. Or more likely, to be able to tell herself that she's had enough to drink that people will forgive her for what she's about to do to them.

But the truth was, Xi'an didn't really know if she had just become accustomed to Kitty's moods, or if Kitty was just deliberately, maybe spitefully, lending her a hand. She could feel it either way, what Kitty was really thinking just beneath the surface, what she was scarcely holding back from saying and making real.

'Oh come on, you came and found me _now_? Where the fuck were you last year? Why didn't you try to find me when I actually _needed_ you? Leave me in space for years, to die alone, but now that you can touch me again you want to be around me?'

That's what Kitty really wanted to be screaming at her, right there. At the other people in the bar. At the State of Illinois. At everyone, really. But she didn't, or at least she hadn't yet, and Xi'an couldn't really say if that was a good sign or not. Emotional mind games were just part of who Kitty was—who could know, with her? Xi'an could only decide to play it safe, and see where the waves took her.

"I came here because Lockheed was worried about you."

"Fine. Whatever. You can go home now, and tell him I'm fine. Nothing to worry about."

"You've been gone for three days."

Kitty had a flicker of confusion cross her face, her nose just stopping from scrunching up, but quickly thought better of whatever she had been about to say.

"So no one's waiting up for me, right?" Kitty asked, instead.

"So, are you?"

"Am I what?"

"Are you drunk yet?"

"You've seen me drunk before. Do I look drunk to you?" she asked, eyes narrower, and in a tone that referenced experience in speaking with a particularly stupid child—or the younger Iceman at his most irritating.

"No, you don't."

'Physical mutation' was a misnomer that way. They were all physical. They all carried changes to basic biology. Kitty's metabolism had always been a bit different. Her body seemed to filter toxins differently, and broke down virtually anything for energy—almost like she was consciously designed to be able to use her mutation for as long as possible. A lot of them were like that.

Kitty had always maintained a weird relationship with alcohol in particular, and it had gotten worse since the Bullet.

"That's because I'm_ not. _Did you know that the CDC definition of 'binge drinking' for a woman is just four drinks? What a load of shit." She just waved dramatically at the bar, and the bottle that had been working on. Bourbon, that is. She was usually a vodka drinker, but in her own words, _why would I waste good vodka on getting hammered? _"I think this is...oh, six drinks, maybe? So its not like I haven't been trying, but still, this is only pleasantly buzzed."

Kitty might not be drunk, but she was still the heaviest drinker Xi'an knew, with the exception of Logan—but least he usually stuck to beer.

* * *

**7.**

"Do you know what you're going to do now?"

"What, you mean like, about our so-called lives? I was going to work on that when I can breathe again."

"Are you going to try to get back together with Bobby?" Xi'an asked.

"I...don't know? Maybe. Does it matter? I really haven't thought about him yet. We had a good thing going... I guess we had a lot of fun, I mean if he needs me to sit with him on suicide watch, I'm not going to tell him he's on his own. But he's not really my top priority right now."

"What is there to think about? Like you said, you had fun. Wasn't that all you were looking for?" If there was anything deeper than Kitty enjoying the adrenaline rush of her crazy antics, and wanting the experience of being a teacher having an affair with an older coworker in the break room, she hadn't noticed it.

"I don't love him," she said, though there was a timbre of askance underneath it.

"So? You can't tell me that you 'loved' Peter. _Either_ of them, and that never stopped you with them."

"Hey, its more complicated than that," she said, letting her fingertips press more tightly against the bar top.

"How? We used to live together. I remember the games you played with everyone, and I remember all of the nights you never came home."

"Those were _strangers! _They weren't _relationships_. Its completely different, I would never treat someone I cared about like that. Shit! Why are you even—"

"Did you?"

"What? Care about—"

"—about any of us?"

"The extents of my social life, as wide a net as it may be, doesn't have anything to do with whether or not I _care _about people. I may have dated a lot of people, but I still cared about them."

"Really? Then where is Peter now? We've talked. Especially when you...were gone—" At that, there was a brief choke, that Xi'an couldn't force back in time, before she couldn't help but glimpse once more that long, uncertain, absence. Nearly twenty-eight months where they didn't know whether they should mourn or continue to hope, and of the twins constantly asking when their 'Aunt Kitty' would be home. "He still drinks himself to sleep, Katherine."

Kitty, unfortunately, didn't seem impressed by her shot in the dark.

"Yeah, _I _ruined Pete," she scoffed. "Its not like he wasn't already drinking himself into a fast grave before we met."

"You don't regret what you did to him, at all?" Xi'an bites off. You don't regret what you did to me, she says as well, in the privacy of her own thoughts.

"If I let myself regret things, I'd never make it out of bed in the morning," Kitty snarked, flippant.

"You expect me to believe that you care about everyone you have been _actually _intimate with. The people with whom real, authentic, intimacy was shared. But sometimes it feels like you just use people. It feels like you just pick and choose the people who can put up with you the longest, and don't waste your time with the others." She used to wonder as well, if Kitty knew about all of her own list of empty, transient, one-night stands back in San Francisco—or if she just didn't care.

"Even if I wanted to sit here arguing and this shit with you, you still don't have any idea what you're talking about," she said with finality, before jumping to her feet and storming out of the bar.

Xi'an paid the rest of Kitty's bill for her—overpaid, really, in the name of safe expediency—and chased after her as quickly as her limp would allow.

* * *

**8.**

They were outside and Kitty was walking away, slowly, but still practically cutting through the dense powdered slush beneath her, unconcerned that Xi'an was harrying after. It took twice as much work as she was used to, trying to limp through the cold snow, but eventually she did manage to catch up to Kitty's leisurely pace.

"Don't you fucking run away from me, Katherine Anne Pryde!" Xi'an shouted.

Kitty just waived her off without looking, and kept walking, as Xi'an walked after her.

"Do you want to know what I want from you? I want you to leave me and my family alone and stay out of my life!"

Great, Xi'an thought. Argue with a crazy person who doesn't even know what she's saying.

Except Kitty _did _know what she was saying. She knew exactly how to make it hurt. She just didn't give a damn. Maybe Xi'an was just tired of letting her walk wherever she wanted.

"You knew what happened to me. But you used me anyway! Just like the others. And you still use me, all the time. You just let it happen whenever you need me, and I'm sick of it."

Kitty stopped, more than a little taken aback at how angry Xi'an sounded beneath the calm, level, voice she forced through the freezing air stagnating in her lungs. To be honest, Xi'an was about as surprised by her own anger. She might have gone looking for Kitty to check up on her, but she found herself unexpectedly annoyed at how cheerfully magnanimous she seemed to be acting. An angry, or even drunk, Kitty was the one she had prepared to deal with. But a Kitty who was just mildly annoyed at everyone, and thought everyone else owed _her_ their gratitude?

That was something she didn't think she could deal with.

Not on that night, only two weeks after watching her father shoot her half-sister dead, only just recovering from having her mind and body stolen from her _yet again_, only to find herself, exhausted, but still having dragged herself out of bed to go searching across the country for an ungrateful friend.

A friend that had to turn her life into dramatic ballet, just so you knew how special she was. Poor Kitty and her sad, horrible, life as a beautiful genius. At least Henry, Ororo, and Emma were a more honest breed of egomaniac narcissist. They could be annoying, but she had never really wanted to grab Ororo's throat and throttle her the way that Kitty could make her feel. Even when Kitty was nice to her, she always had to wonder if it was just another one of her plays for attention.

"You might say that you don't want me pining after you, that you only want me as your friend. But that is a _lie_, and every time you say it, you make me feel _cheap_. No one else has ever done that to me, and you do it all the time."

She didn't know why she kept doing this to herself. Holding out pointless hope for someone that she knew didn't want her. Why did she keep convincing herself that it was alright? That this shameless one-sided dependency was better than nothing. Wasn't nothing at least better than something lousy?

"Fuck you, Shan," she said, when they were almost touching. "Fuck _you, _and your self-righteous fairy tale hypocrisy. You don't get to judge me just because I slept with everyone except for _you_."

But even then she could never really forget that no matter where she started out, Kitty still had no family, that nearly all of her friends had died and betrayed her. And she could never really accomplish anything of meaning, or have any sense of fulfillment in her work. She was too good at everything for her actions to carry real weight—it was all too trivial. Maybe that just carried through and poisoned everything else within her; void and worthless.

Most of the time Xi'an didn't know what to do with her. Even then, she didn't know if she wanted to punch her in the face for ruining her life, or wrap her up in a hug and tell her that she was good and things would be alright.

"I'm not judging you!"

"Yes you are!"

"Fine, maybe a little, but this isn't me slut-shaming you or whatever childish lie you're telling yourself, so that you can keep pretending that I'm 'just imagining things.' You can give whatever parts of yourself to whoever you want, whether its your heart or just your body, but actions and words _mean_ something and you _knew _what you were doing when you led me on!"

"You don't get to pin this all on me. I didn't _make you_ fall in love with me! And you are _not _the only one who got led on, and ended up hurt," she said, gesturing at herself with a little twirl of both wrists, and almost pointing at Xi'an before letting her hand drop. Her voice hadn't quavered yet, as Xi'an's had, but her eyes had started to thin as she continued. "You knew I was straight! You knew! You were the one that couldn't handle that. _You. _Did you think I was only making that up?Or did you just ignore it, like you always do, and hope it would go away because it was too hard for you to deal with. All you ever do is run—"

"You're the one ran away in the night so she wouldn't have to deal with her friends."

"I didn't run away! I _like _being alone, Shan! I'm allowed to do things in my own fucking time."

"If you didn't want me to find you, you wouldn't have _let me_ find you. You would have stolen a bottle of gin from a liquor store and gotten drunk in a cave, if you didn't want to be found, and neither I nor anyone else would have known where to look."

"So _what_? That doesn't mean anything. I like bars, and I like bars in Chicago. I shouldn't have to live underground just to be alone for a while. I can be alone whenever I want, and choosing not to go to asinine lengths to protect my privacy isn't an invitation to be stalked."

"I'm not stalking you, Lockheed sent me."

"He's not _perfect_. We're different species—emotions don't always line up. This isn't an act, Shan. I wasn't trying to make him fly away, but I wasn't too broken up when he did."

"But you _hate _being alone. You're just too used to it to change."

"So? Why do I have to change? I'm not hurting anyone—at least not anyone who doesn't deserve it. And you? You act like you're so understanding, just because you're a littlebit different, but you're not that special. You're not in some special plane, apart from the rest of us, just because you like women instead of men. You're not so fucking special, you're not any different from everyone else, and you have no idea what it feels like to _actually _be different. At least you can find other people who are like you. Your box might be different from mine, but no matter how many you have, at least you fit into them."

"Maybe it is my own fault I fell in love with you. Of course you shouldn't have to feel guilty for that, I'm not blaming you for _that._ I could have walked away and I didn't. But you still _count on it_. You used me once. And you never think anything about using me again, whenever you're alone. "

"I never strung you along! Do you think I just stayed up at night, dreaming up ways to fuck with you? I was serious about living together. I only left because _you _were going to leave me."

Xi'an just snorted, shaking her head in a mocking of a disdainful laugh.

"Oh please, stop trying to turn me into the bad guy, here," Kitty said. "We gave it a chance, it didn't work out, and even after we fucked things up, we were still friends!"

"Are we? Is that what we are? You are so full of shit. We lived together for a year. We paid all of our bills together and you help me raise the twins. Why don't we ask _them_, if they think that we're friends?"

"Don't even start. I take better care of those kids than you ever have," she said, and Xi'an wanted to dig a hole in the snow and die right there.

"Yes. You do. You're a great parent, you know that? And that was _your_ idea. 'Just in case.'" She took a breath. "And you still have the temerity to say you never led me on. You do use people. You string us along so that you can feel normal, you make us invest ourselves in you. And then you cut us out, and act like we're the ones being unreasonable. You leave us and you never look back. You act like you don't have any obligations to us at all. And when we don't leave? You _make_ us, and then pretend it was our fault—that we were the ones who were using _you_. You did it to Bobby. You did it to Peter. You did it to Rachel."

"That's great, Shan," she said, with a terse nod. "Thanks for the insight. You're so invaluable to me. I guess I just don't connect with people, because I was a latchkey kid, and my mother never loved me. Problem solved. I'll be sure to tell my therapist that her services are no longer required. I really couldn't have done it without you. You can leave now."

"What happened to you?"

"Nothing 'happened' to me. You've already made it pretty clear that you think I'm an obnoxious, degenerate, loner and always have been."

"You used to at least regret it more."

"Yeah well, I didn't ask you to come out here. That was all you Shan. I wanted to be fucking alone where I didn't have to worry about any of this."

Xi'an shook loose of herself with a dismayed huff.

"Fine, have it your way. But this time, you don't get to complain."

She started to limp away, and found herself growing more serious about it with each step, her mood escalating from uncertainty to apathy regarding her friend. She had just about given up on it entirely when she felt Kitty's hand abruptly gripping one of her mittens, and let the elasticity of the hold turning her around more gracefully than normal.

She looked down, questioningly, at her hand and wrist, before finding Kitty's wide black eyes.

"What do you think you're doing?"

"What?"

"If Robert had done that to you, when you left," she began, calmly. "You would have put him in the ground."

Kitty flinched, and settled her hands twitching slightly at her sides, before she caught herself and fell slake.

"Well?" Xi'an asked.

"I didn't want you to leave like that," she admitted.

"I didn't want to either, Katherine. But I'm not doing this with you. I'm too tired, and its too cold. You need to give me something, at least."

But Kitty only twisted her nerves into a knot, making her eyelids fall, and the tip of her nose scrunch up.

Xi'an thought, for a miserable moment, that it was all she was going to get out of her.

"If you don't tell me why we're here standing in the snow, at three in the morning, I'm going to the airport and waiting for the next flight out. You can come with me if you want, but that's it."

"Shan..." she begun hesitantly but, at seeing the impatience within Xi'an's face, that she had not yet relinquished, said the first words that formed in her mouth, without consideration. "I don't even know if I'm alive anymore."

* * *

**9.**

Within seconds, she had melted into a startled, stricken, look. She couldn't believe she had actually said that, but had known that she had to say _something_. It slipped out on its own, and she had found herself struck without an idea of how to proceed now that it was out in the open.

She was almost near to hyperventilation, but not close enough for it to actually occur. She wasn't respiring, it was just a sort of empty heaving. Her body was only going through the motions of it. It knew what a what a human being was supposed to be. It still knew, even if she may have forgotten, how it was supposed to feel and how it was supposed to respond to stresses.

"I can't _breathe._" She felt like she had been emptied, like she had become too insubstantial. She can't hold together anymore, or endure her pain. Yes, the world spun on and right through her, but she still felt like she was stretched by it, constantly deformed until reaching a rupture point that never quire came. Instead there were pieces of her, stretched throughout the whole of her life, left behind along the frame of a distorted whole. She never really advanced; she just stretched a little bit more.

If she tried to relax herself away from it, to bring herself back into a natural state, she was afraid of what she might accidentally pull back along with her.

"I feel like I'm still out there," Kitty choked out. "In space. In the dark, surrounded by all that metal. Its a part of me now. It just keeps moving with me still inside of it."

She couldn't feel herself moving away from anything, because she took it all with her wherever she went. She never gained any meaningful ground on herself. Even now, she could feel herself still infected by the Brood, feeling her killers growing inside of her. No matter how far away she ran, she was always finding _karesansui_ in strange rocks, and always fighting the temptation to trace circles with her shoes until she formed a pattern that captured her in stillness.

She was still trapped in Victor's lab, dissolving piece by piece—so it was really no wonder that she always felt like she was still trapped in a box.

It just kept creeping up on her.

And it always found a way to repeat.

She could feel herself, in that coffin, face to face with a friend she hadn't expected to find. She could feel herself on the High Evolutionary's space station, as it burned up. She could feel herself, still in that Bullet—and every time she closed her eyes...

"I think I died when I phased it," she said, slumped bonelessly. "I just know that I was asleep for a long time. I might have only been dreaming, but there were a few times when I could have sworn I was awake. There'd be nothing, for a long time, or just a single moment stretched into one... but then the next thing I'd know, I'd be lost in some post-apocalyptic wasteland fighting Sue Storm, of all people. But then it'd be asleep again, and I wouldn't wake up for a long time..."

She would just fall back into a dull sleep, broken only by intermittent visions of the worlds her prison sped towards. She was awake in those times, just long enough to phase, and to unphase again, sparing those worlds from her own fate. And that was all, until Erik finally called her back to Earth.

"And I feel like its still going on. Sometimes I'm awake, sometimes I'm not. There's no rhyme or reason to it. I don't think I need to sleep anymore—I don't know if I want to find out. But I seem to go a long time between crashing. And this is all just... I don't know. A recollection. I just remember how things were supposed to be, and play along for as long as I can, until I forget what I'm doing."

She knew she would end up the again, back inside, one day. One way or another.

Everything else repeated. It just kept building up, layer by layer, on a wobbly scaffolding that never quite tipped over.

"You know how my ability works, right? I'm not like Vision. When I become intangible, I'm not just becoming less dense. My body isn't really changing at all. I'm still solid, I still exist as a tangible, physical object—just not _here_."

"What does that have to do with...?"

"Because I've started to think that maybe I had it all wrong from the beginning. What if its not that I'm still solid, in some other time or space. What if I was _never_ solid? What if my ability is just letting me imitate being tangible? All those years of being careful, taking a deep breath before phasing through the earth, or making sure that I was completely phased every time I got into a fight. What if I didn't need to. Maybe I'm just imitating a person, but I don't really need to be one."

They had told her she spent three years out there; but detached from gravity, reality, and causality it had felt far more. She had just drifted forever, caught in the wake of the Breakworld's magic, drifting through the universe one billion miles per second. Too fast to see the light of the stars she left behind, even if not for the walls imprisoning her. It had occurred to her, more than once, that maybe that was all she really was—just another wave echoing infinitely through the galactic filament, untouchable even by cold suns and hot galaxies. Maybe she was just a set of repeating waves, a familiar pattern that always started over again, no matter how many bodies it crashed into along the way.

"I'm only nineteen, Shan. Its not fucking fair. If I unphase, and let the cold in, my ribs and my foot and knees make me feel like I'm forty. I feel it every day and it just gets worse, but its like time still never catches up to me. I'll feel like I'm beat up enough to _die_, but I'm still not even twenty-three like I'm supposed to be. I was nineteen when I went in. You don't know what it felt like when it happened. Making that thing intangible, it felt like it killed me. And I was still nineteen when Erik pulled me out. What if I'm already dead? What if I just don't _know_?"

Kitty grabbed Xi'an's wrist tightly with both hands, and held it up, absent any thought that would have given her advance warning. Kitty phased before Xi'an realized what was happening, just pulling Xi'an into her, until the older woman's hand had slipped through her—particle by particle, until Xi'an's fingers and Kitty's own heart were occupying the same space in time.

"Kitty, stop—"

"You can feel it, right? My heart is still beating. But I don't need to breathe or eat anymore. My blood still carries oxygen that I don't need, and nutrients that I don't have, throughout my body. But it doesn't need to. So what is this red squishy thing really doing for me? Is it even keeping me alive? If you pulled it out right now, wouldn't I just be ok?"

"Kitty... Oh Kitty, don't be silly. _Of course_ you can still _die_. We've met gods before, Kitty, don't you remember? Even they die."

She wondered what they looked like standing there like that. If someone else walked out of the bar, would they just see Kitty holding her against her? They would probably think she was comforting her, Xi'an thought. Not that she had any idea of how to do that. Kitty was right about that—she really did have no idea how to deal with her. All she could really do was try to make her fit with what she knew, try to apply what she understood about her own life—but it never really worked out the way she wanted it to. Being able to read minds didn't really let you understand them; telepathy didn't have anything to say about why Kitty thought in the ways that she thought.

I'm holding her heart in my hand right now—and she would probably wouldn't stop me if I pulled it out.

"Then why won't I? I should have been dead when Danger stabbed me—Piotr was. He was dead for five minutes until Josh fixed us. But I wasn't—I was awake the whole time. Ask Emma if you don't believe me. I had my throat slit on Utopia, and all it did was remind me how to pull myself back together. I should have burned to death when Piotr attacked the school, when he attacked _me_. The Death Seed should have... I shouldn't even be _me_ anymore. I feel like I've died a dozen times but I'm still awake, and now your hand is on my heart."

"Do you _want _to die?" Xi'an cautiously slipped her wrist through Kitty's intertwined fingers—or rather Kitty let her phase on through. She wasn't sure if she pulled Kitty up against her, in the intervening settling, or if one of them just fell against the other. Regardless, it ended with both of them holding on to each other to avoid slipping, and each of them loosely pulling the other down into the packed snow. Before long, she felt like Kitty was holding on to her like she was the last bit of dry land, and the only thing keeping her from being pulled under by a rip current.

"Its ok, if you do," Xi'an continued. It hurt a little, the position they were in, this way of not _quite_ sitting together. The joint on her prosthetic leg wasn't meant to bend that way at the knee. It had displaced a little, and was pinching her thigh at the socket. "If you want to die, that's ok. I've felt the same way. Everyone has."

"I don't know. No. I've got a lot of things to do. "

"That's not the same as wanting to be alive. Or even not wanting to die."

Xi'an saw the corners of her eyes crinkling slightly as she relaxed.

"I don't know Shan, not wanting to die is usually the best I do, so I guess I'm alright. I'm just worried about stupid shit. I don't really understand anything that's happened to me... even Reed and Tony... shit, I even called Victor. All we know is I've changed since the last time."

"That was a bit obvious."

Xi'an's breath was very cold against her face, Kitty noticed.

"Only a bit?" Kitty asked.

She felt Xi'an go slightly rigid, as she leaned forward.

She phased just as Xi'an sneezed.

"Here..." Kitty said, brushing some of the loosened moisture out of Xi'an's eyes, before pressing her fingers against her; she phased Xi'an's body along with her's, and Xi'an noticed her airway becoming clearer. "Better?"

"Yes. Thank you."

"Were you sick?"

"No, I don't think so. It was just a sneeze."

"You've always sucked with the cold."

Xi'an couldn't help but think about how dangerous that minute act of comfort actually was. People never gave Kitty credit for how threatening her mutation could be. Yes, Kitty could walk up behind you and pull your heart right out of your chest, but that was far from the worst of it. If she lost concentration for even a split second, instead of pulling you through a wall with her, she could detach you from the gravity of the Earth (or the Sun... or the galaxy...) Suddenly you'll be lost in space drifting forever through the universe.

Or she could shift the oxygen out of your body.

Or move your entire circulatory system a millimeter to the right.

But comfort and danger always went hand-in-hand with people like Kitty, so maybe that was alright too.

Kitty felt a jerk in her nerves, as that basic background pattern of emotion and intent passed between them. Before the thought had even crossed Xi'an's mind, it had begun to flow across the absent space between them.

To Xi'an, it felt as strange coming out as it did going in, as that flickering flame seeped out of the space between her flesh and her soul. Oddly, she realized only in that moment, it felt a lot like the sensation of Kitty touching her while she was phased. Not the feeling of Kitty passing through, because there was nothing to feel; instead, the sensation of when she wasn't really there, but was nonetheless able to touch. Where she was, on some level, still interacting with another person's particles as if they were a part of her own. And, it turned out, holding Illyana's soul wasn't very different from having her hand on Kitty's heart.

Kitty trepidatiously yielded and let it pass into her, only imagining the phantom pain below her left eye, where Illyana had once sliced through her cheek. They could feel a measure of warmth passing between them, soft like a hug as it passed into Kitty's body, as Illyana's magic flowed into her and merged with her own. Xi'an was lucky Kitty had her eyes closed to savor the moment; she couldn't take her eyes off her, the way that brief flash of fire lit her skin from within, fleetingly making her olive skin look a little more gold. It was far more authentic than all of the fake tears Xi'an had seen her shed in the time they had known one another.

"Did you know that was the only thing that can cut me...?"

"So as long as it exists, you don't have anything to worry about."

Kitty just sighed, and helped Xi'an stand back up with her.

"There _are_ still people who care about you," Xi'an reminded her.

"I know that. I just don't know if its enough for me anymore. It feels like all of the people I thought I could count on have left, one after another. But then I keep on going, no matter what," she said, phasing a little more through Xi'an, so that she could settle down into the snow. She just slumped over, sprawling her feet out, and sitting with her hands wrapped around her knees.

Xi'an, still mostly pressed against Kitty, only had to shift slightly to put her hands around her shoulders.

"But I'm still here. I'm not going anywhere."

"You can't know that. You could die tomorrow. Or ten years from now. And then I'll be back to drinking alone and having this conversation with no one."

Xi'an just rolled her eyes, giving in to impulse and to whimsy.

"Hannah bat-Ariel," Xi'an jokingly begun to say, while awkwardly trying to stress the first 'n' the way she distantly remembered Kitty's mother pronouncing it. She made damned sure that Kitty noticed that eye roll. "If this is really that important you, than I swear before God that I will find a way to outlive you."

Kitty had to stifle a snicker at that bit of absurdity, tried to look away before she couldn't stop. Xi'an resorted to cupping her jaw, to stop her, and lifting her face back up.

"Even if I have to kill you myself, just so that you can die knowing, that at least one of your friends was there for you until the end."

"Thanks," a smile breaks at that, even if its just a tug of her lip.

"Only you could be strange enough to find that promise comforting."

"It really is a lot to ask."

"Believe me, this is a dream I've wanted to make into reality often enough."

"Yeah, I could tell. In my family, my Hebrew name usually means I'm in trouble."

* * *

**10.**

They were still walking in the snow, with no real destination in mind but for Kitty's idle fancy, when one message too many from her friends finally stopped her dead. This time it was an email from Jean, and one she made the mistake of actually opening.

The first thing was, she had to bite down her deeply ingrained, and well worn, revulsion. She didn't want for a cohesive enough thought, one developed enough for a telepath to pick up on, to go floating through her mind—not even when it was just Xi'an. It was something she had to keep a tight lid on because, she knew, this wasn't _that _Jean. This wasn't the Jean that stole Maddie's family from her, and Kitty, who wouldn't have let anyone else treat her like she was, couldn't afford to think of her that way.

But then that same loathing and irritation found a worthy new target, forced its way through her defenses, and floated to the surface—because the email was actually from Ororo. She was only borrowing Jean's phone and her school email account, so that she could remind Kitty to come home because there was something wrong with the security system and Dr. McCoy hasn't fixed it yet—and she was being so terribly selfish and childish by letting her worry about her in this situation.

So fucking typical, Kitty thought to herself, as she read the message out loud to Xi'an.

"She doesn't even ask me for my help," she said, once she was finished. "_That _never even occurs to any of them, that they might actually _need_ me there. That I designed that system, that I'm the one who maintains it, that _maybe _I could just fix it for them. If there's anything even wrong with it in the first place. Assholes only want me around to lock me up in a cage and keep me safe—_from my life!_"

She couldn't go even five seconds before it started to boil up inside of her again. That familiar, barely, scarcely articulate, rage born from wound and betrayal. It never really went away anymore—it could only change targets from one to the next.

"Forget for a moment that it actually happened to me!"

"Kitty..."

"That actually _happened__ to me. _I was in a fucking tank, locked up in a cleanroom, for months! And don't tell me that it wasn't more convenient for _them_ to just leave me that way," and there was a frozen mist of breath in the air, that she spat out as she shouted her last.

"You need to settle yourself down, please," Xi'an implored her, slowly enough that Kitty would have to pause to hear. "Just look at your feet."

Kitty looked down, seeing that she had started to phase, this time unknowingly, through snow that was supposed to have been beneath her.

Xi'an was skimming Kitty's surface thoughts, and felt her just letting the emotions flow freely. Xi'an could feel everything that was still unsaid between them, and just let her own gifts give meaning to the sensations for her. It was barely in words, and for what little structure there was, Xi'an found herself needing to patch through the language centers of Kitty's brain to understand.

Some of it was just about Kitty's mundane disillusionment and resentment at the way she had treated by the team, and it'd only gotten worse since Scott and Emma left. Scott had at least valued her as a person, both for what she brought to the table professionally, as well as what she could do for the team in the field. Sure, he as well had treated her primarily as a noncombatant when drawing up sortie plans, but it was _different_. There was never any doubt that Scott just thought she was _good_ at it, at keeping civilians out of the line of fire. She was just better at it than anyone else was, especially when paired up with a telepath for crowd control. And when she did have to fight, or when a mission called for someone to escort someone through enemy territory, or to sneak into a secret military facility, at least there was trust that she'd get the job done.

And as for Emma, well, at least Emma _understood_. To hell with her, six days out of seven, but on the last day she could at least trust her to understand.

But now... She had been effectively running the school herself for months, and constantly covering classes for Logan, Hank, and Bobby—whenever they thought they had more important things to do. But they still treated her like auxiliary staff at best, unless someone needed paperwork done, or for someone to talk to parents or the school board. The kind of things that the important people were too important to do.

But they were supposed to be beyond that! Or at least she'd thought they were. She never had those kind of problems when Scott and Xavier were running the show. What the hell had changed, other than how she dressed? Its like she started dressing more professionally and suddenly everyone realized that she had legs and hips and breasts and stopped paying attention to anything she said. Like she had to choose between being a sexless work monkey, and no longer having the care or concern of the people around her.

This is how much appreciation she got for all of the work she put in, towards helping Logan with his school: when Logan was fighting his nonsensical personal war with Scott, he sold the school back to Xavier without even warning her. Did he think she wouldn't _notice_?

It never even occurred to him to just trust her to do her job without him looking over her shoulder.

But when_ was_ the last time anyone actually recognized one of her contributions to the new school? Has anyone ever complimented her on one? No, of course not—that praise has all gone to Hank. Brilliant biophysicist, geneticist, and xenobiologist Hank McCoy, but did that stop anyone from just assuming he built everything single handedly? Who do they think ran the fiber optics through the walls? Or set up the school's network? _Hank? _Hank is a _terrible_ hacker. Hank's 'secure' password for the last twenty-five years has been his mother's name!

They'd all been a team for years, everyone lending their own expertise whenever they were available: Hank, of course, but also Forge, Xavier, Moira, Erik, Kavita, Jeffries, Dr. Nemesis, Nate, Doug, Warlock, Brian, Danger... But now they open a new school and everything changes.

Xavier did all of the original Danger Room and network security coding himself. And when they decided to reopen the school, she took care of it. If Hank had done it, it probably would have become sentient again. Not that you'd know that; even the younger Hank McCoy hadn't hesitated to 'fix' the programming on the plane's flight control computer.

Was it just that natural for everyone to give Hank credit for anything? And not just things that she did—Doug, Forge, Brian, and Erik. Outside help like Tony and Reed. Lilandra and the Shi'ar? How many of Hank's credited inventions came from other galaxies? And does anyone really think that Hank just reverse engineered them himself? Even Richards couldn't have pulled that off. Their technology was too different. Xavier had to handle most of that—only a telepath interfacing directly with Shi'ar engineers made it possible. And then she, Doug, and later Erik had to spend most of their downtime ironing out defects in the human half's ability to communicate in human/Shi'ar hybrid technologies. They _still _hadn't understood everything until Danger had come to life and just told them what they had wrong.

And what about the Phoenix? Did anyone even _bother_ to ask for her opinion before suiting up and going off to die on the moon? She used to share a brain with Rachel! She had analyzed, studied, and _quantified_ the nature of Rachel's power the entire time they were in London together. She could have saved the X-Men and the Avengers the entire trouble of going to war against each other, if anyone had bothered to consult with her, when they first found out that the stupid fire bird was on its way. But in the end, Logan and the others just told her to stay at home and mind the children. They didn't even think to talk to Rachel, though, so she didn't know why she was so surprised that she was ignored too.

She didn't give a damn what the kids thought about her abilities or her intelligence: but Logan, Hank, and Ororo? The people who are supposed to be her friends? Ororo and Logan, who have temerity to claim a parental bond with her? How many times did they ignore her, marginalize her, or even leave her to die alone? How many times did she tell herself that they just had faith in her, knew she could take care of herself, that people less capable merely needed them more? She couldn't even remember why she used to believe that.

She didn't even know what they were fighting for anymore. She'd _thought_that she and Logan were reopening the school to give the kids a safe haven away from all of the insanity, so they could grow up and learn to face it themselves. But now, its like they were just isolating everyone from the real world, so that they could hide from it until it went away. They have an entire squad on the Avengers and an international platform, and what did Alex, **the** spokesperson for the cause of mutant rights, do with it? What bold new direction are the X-Men and the Jean Grey School laying out? That the world is now safe for Anglo people everywhere. Problem solved. No more racism. Congratulations.

She supposed all of her friends that died in Sentinel attacks and in labor camps were just unlucky—wrong place, wrong time. Nothing to do for it.

Fucker doesn't even care. Just doesn't want to be called a mutant, but doesn't have any problems with being called "white" or "male" or "straight." Asshole just doesn't want to have to deal with not being part of the majority anymore. Alex Summers, the new face of the mutant minority: along with Wanda Maximoff who, to if they were all being perfectly honest, should be off dying in a fucking prison (for the crime of 'Everything').

"Kitty..." Xi'an begun, "If you feel that way, what are you even doing here? Why are you still here?"

She waited for the brief flicker of recognition through Kitty's surface thoughts, confirming that she understood her meaning, before continuing.

"Whatever it is you're looking for, I don't think you'll ever find it with the X-Men. And you don't _have_ to stay with them. You have more options than most of us. You could go back to SHIELD, or join the Avengers. Stark is crazy about you, he'd give you your own team in a heartbeat—you could just spend the rest of your life designing space ships. You could follow Lockheed back to SWORD, or go back to England. You could even come work for me if you want to. I have no idea what I'm doing with Da'o's company. I don't know what any of it means—I'll make you my Chief Technology Officer right now, we can both leave the school, figure it all out together and never look back."

"I don't _hate_ them, Shan. They're still my friends. They just drive me nuts. I gave up my life for these people and none of them care. I am not their fuck up teen sidekick. I've _never been_ their teen sidekick. I just want them to stop treating me like one, and stop treating me like the only thing I'm looking for is their worthless approval."

Xi'an could definitely sympathize. She felt the same way, to an extent. She felt like she had wasted the best years of her life, exchanged any potential happiness she had for misery and self-loathing, and found herself utterly unappreciated for it. Hadn't they both been taken completely for granted? When had anyone ever stopped to thank her for ruining her life, just so she could be worthy of the tiny little fixture she occupied in their tiny little world? Xavier may have been different, as well Scott, and perhaps, ironically, Magneto. But Emma, Logan, or Ororo? Even Henry? What do any of them really _care_ about the people beneath them? Actions speak, and haven't theirs only shown that, in their minds, the loyalty they were given was merely what they were naturally due?

But still...

"You can't have it both ways. You can either hide behind characters and make people underestimate you, you can work put the people around you at ease; or you can be acknowledged for who you are, and deal with the consequences of that. You can't do both."

"My own friends should know better. They shouldn't buy into what everyone else does."

"You sell it too well sometimes." Sometimes, she means to say, even I forget that you're not just empty on the inside.

Another moment passed in silence.

"Shan... I haven't had to breathe since I got back. I mean, I still need to breathe to be able to talk. But... nothing happens to me if I... stop."

"I know. You already told me that, Kitty."

"I did? Sorry," she said, while drifting off a few feet away from her.

"Its fine. There's nothing to be sorry about."

"I'm kind of... I don't know."

"Restless?" Xi'an asked.

"...you know me really well," Kitty said, after exhaling.

"I know."

A beat went by, with Kitty holding back whatever it was that she wanted to say.

"So, what's wrong?"

"I'm not sure. I haven't had to breathe since I got back, like I said, but I'm not sure that's actually true."

"What do you mean? You either breathe or you don't"

"What if I just never _knew_ I didn't have to breathe? What if I only _thought_ I needed to? But I never really did?"

"Would that be a bad thing? Wouldn't that just mean that you're completely okay, that everything is perfectly alright, that you've been worrying yourself over nothing?"

"Maybe. I hope so, anyway. But it could also mean I was never alive to begin with."

"Haven't you considered that you could just turn it off?"

"Turn what off?"

"Your ability. Even if everything you're afraid of is true, you could just learn how to control it, couldn't you? Just like when you were trapped in your intangible state, and learned how to become solid again."

"But I never learned how to become solid again, I just learned how to touch things while I'm phased. I still fall through floors, walk through people, even pass through the planet if I'm not careful. It happens to me all the time, when I'm not paying attention." She leaned up against a lamp post, miserably, and weightlessly. She took a breath before they started walking away again. "And to be honest, it's awesome, right? I've learned to do all this awesome shit with my mutation. And I love that. But it's like it takes shit away from me too. Because now I can start daydreaming, and suddenly, _whoops: _now I'm in Cleveland.

"It's like, it gets easier and easier for me to lose control. But, it's also like, at the same time, I'm ending up with less I can afford to lose."

* * *

**11.**

Kitty's phone chimed as another message came in from Jean's number. She deleted it without looking, and Xi'an find herself growing worried at the almost growling, nearly snarling, expression contorting her face. But then, before she could say anything to her, Kitty's shoulders started shaking as she built up to a sudden bout of inexplicable laughter.

She couldn't hold it in, and just started laughing harder and harder until she actually lost equilibrium, and could no longer stand without her knees giving out over herself. It was all she could do to maintain the presence of mind to phase, and hold herself up on the air around her, when she couldn't find a wall or another lamp post near by to brace herself against.

Xi'an couldn't help but be even more worried, at the ongoing about-faces of Kitty's mental state.

"Kitty... what's wrong?"

Kitty just looked at her blankly for a few seconds, as if she had forgotten where she was, before cracking up all over again.

"_Jean!_" she gasped, at length.

"What?"

Kitty stood up in front of her and put her hands on the side of Xi'an's face, pressing down on her cheeks, and forced eye contact. It was something that Xi'an had noticed many times before, that even though she couldn't feel any body heat from Kitty, her skin still felt paradoxically less cold from the contact. Once again, she couldn't help but to wonder at Kitty's claim that she was just _always_ phased on some level. It seemed to put a lot of little strangenesses like that into a different context. Maybe she really wasn't there, after all, even when she felt solid.

And if she's right, she doesn't _actually_ turn solid, does she? If Kitty's always intangible, and has just learned how to touch anyway, she couldn't help but wonder what that actually meant for her. Can she actually feel sensation like a regular person? She clearly knows when she's touching something, and she knows when something is hot, or cold, or wet; but did Kitty actually experience those sensations in the same way as other people?

Or was her ghost touch, that facsimile of physical contact that lets her interact with the world while phased, all she really had? Can Kitty feel the actual macroscopic texture of an object, or does she only feel the particles that compose it? If she submerges her hand in a bowl of water, will she actually feel wet, or will she only feel molecules of water pressing against the lipids making up her skin? Can Kitty feel passion and anger through contact warmth, or does that just pass through her like everything else?

Maybe that's why she seemed to leap between emotions so fast, when her guard was shaken.

(Maybe that's why she's crazy, may have been another, less charitable, and less honest, way to put it).

She could feel something tugging between them, and mentally relented, using some of her telepathic strength to hold Kitty together. It was just a little, enough so that she could actually control herself, and get through what she wanted to say. She could feel the anticipation just building inside of the younger woman.

"We were in the middle of a lesson," Kitty started. "You know, isolation training to help her stop reading minds accidentally? So last week, we're out in the woods and lost track of time, so we ran a little over. I didn't wan to be late, so I took Jean with me, when I picked up the twins from school. She didn't get how I could be their aunt, so she just asks me _are they adopted? _and before I could say anything, she just looks at me, dead serious, and she says _you're doing a good thing. I completely support the Oriental Race._"

"It's not funny," Xi'an said, a little too quickly, so that she could force it all out before she started laughing too.

Neither one of them could control herself, and just as Kitty needed Xi'an to hold her together a moment before, Xi'an found that enough of Kitty's psychotic glee was bleeding through their connection that she wouldn't be able to stand herself without Kitty's help.

"It is kind of funny," Kitty said, once they had both managed to calm down. "She wants to start a Better Dead Than Red club. I think it all ties together for her. It's like, I'm her new hero, for keeping your kids away from those nutty commie bastards."

"So she doesn't know that you think Trotskyism is _basically a good idea?_"

"Amazingly, she hasn't a clue. I mean, it hasn't exactly had a chance to come up, but she doesn't even know I'm Russian—I think that _she _thinks that all Jews came from the same neighborhood in Düsseldorf."

"So your obsessive morning ritual hasn't tipped her off?"

"Yeah, believe it or not. But I'm saving that bombshell revelation for a rainy day. Jean was already so shocked when she found out my family's Jewish. My _nose is so small_. She tried to talk to me in Yiddish a few days later. I guess you pick things up if you grow up in New York? But why would she even think that I'd speak Yiddish? I'm from Deerfield_._ Dad's family spoke Polish and Hebrew. My mother's family spoke Russian and Karaim. I don't think she'd be able to process it at all, B-T-W, if you told her that there are different kinds of Jews."

"It sounds like a sweet gesture though. She was just trying to be nice to you."

"How would you like it if I started speaking to you in Vietnamese?"

"I don't _speak _Vietnamese."

"Yeah, and I don't speak Yiddish. I didn't sound off on her or anything, I get she was trying to be nice, but it was still kind of thoughtless. There isn't some global homogeneous Jewish community. We don't _all _speak the same language or have the same customs."

"You're still a terrible person. Making fun of a hapless, defenseless, ingénue. She grew up in the nineteen sixties, she doesn't actually know what she's saying."

"That's what makes it fun! This other time... you remember when I took her to Japan? I wanted to give her some practice using her telepathy to talk with people in another language. So I took her to this bar Yukio likes in Kobe..." Kitty trailed off, and shifted her eyes back-and-forth conspiratorially, before continuing in sotto voce. "She said she couldn't believe _how friendly Orientals are_."

"I've only met her once," but Xi'an felt herself to offer up her own story all the same. "She needed my help to find a book."

"And?"

"She told that it was 'impressive' that I'm so 'articulate.'"

"Aw, that's _boring!_"

A thought occurred to Xi'an, and then Kitty flinched as she felt Xi'an's hand passing insubstantially through her head.

"Hey! What was that for?" she asked, as Xi'an finished trying to smack her.

"She bowed!" Xi'an accused. "That sounds just like your brand of idiot flourish. You told her to, didn't you!"

"Oh God, Yes. I did. Of course I did." She paused shortly before bursting out in a shout. "_And Rachel!_ Oh God, oh God, the look on Rae's face. She and Jean hadn't met yet... but she got back and... you know, skin tight red leather... spiked coat... so Jean asked her... oh man I can't even say it... Think I'm... going to die... now..."

By the time they both stopped laughing, Kitty had to wipe the tears off Xi'an's face with her sleeve.

A speculative look came over her face.

"Maybe she thinks its water?" she said, contemplatively.

"She thinks what is water?" Xi'an asked.

"Vodka." She went on, "Scott thinks something happened to the water supply, and that's why you can buy it in bottles. Maybe Jean thinks that I just really like water."

"And that you drink it out of shot glasses?"

"Maybe she's not smart, ok?"

"She doesn't exist for your amusement," Xi'an said. She rolled her eyes at Kitty's skeptical pout. "Its not fair for you to torment people who genuinely trust you and think you have their best interests at heart."

"Someone has to. And anyone dumb enough to trust me kind of deserves it."

"Maybe."

"No. _Definitely_."

"Okay, but it shouldn't be you doing it. Not the girl whose first words to Ororo were, I have this on good authority, quote—_hey Ororo, we got some black folks at my school, but none of them look like you do._"

"I was just trying to be nice! And I don't sound like that."

"You do sound a little like that."

"No one appreciates me! I work really hard to teach them to use their powers responsibly and survive in our magical future world without accidentally pushing the wrong button on their phone, and sending out embarrassing photos, or converting all of their savings into crypto and losing _everything_—so I'm entitled to some compensatory entertainment now and again."

"And what have you actually taught them? All you do is make them fight the giant robots from _Mass Effect _in the Danger Room—"

"That's good training! They need to be ready to face anything. So what if I program in some Cylons and some T-1000s, or Lavos, now and again? Do you know how long it took me to solo Yogg-Saron the first time? And I'm not even a telepath, _or_ the Great Hank McCoy. And they're actual superheroes, not an undersized elf hunter all on her own, except for her trusty dragonhawk companion. Kids today have it easy."

"But the rest of the time you only make them watch reruns of _Batman_ and_ T.J. Hooker_! Where's the pedagogical value in that?"

"It lets them bask in awe and witness the encapsulated development of modern America, at a pace that their feeble sixties brains can cope with and learn from. We're starting _MacGyver_ next week."

"Which is a completely different thing from _The Guyver_."

"Oh, absolutely—but that's on the list too. Its like, my sacred duty as a teacher, right? Jean especially. She's just this cute little doe-eyed innocent, like the living incarnation of one of those holiday marshmallow rabbits—you can even dress her up like a superhero for fun. Someone needs to take that girl under their wing, save her from her weird archaic counter-feminist bondage, and it might as well be me. I mean, she's from the sixties right? She might even equate feminism with communism. Its not exactly out of the realm of possibility, so we have to be extra careful with her. When I first met her, it was like she didn't know _anything_. She's just missed so much life. She's never even _heard of_ Gina Carano, you know what I mean?"

"No?"

"Phht, you're _French_," Kitty sulked. "So you don't count."

"Hey!"

"She almost had a heart attack when she found out that Bobby and I weren't married. I thought she and Idie were going to gang up on me to complain about how I'm an immoral sinner. Someone really had to give her a crash course in real living for the modern woman."

Honestly Kitty couldn't believe that they still had students who got frustrated with Sooraya. So she wears a niqab, big deal, at least she's not ultra judgmental of women who want to have actual careers, or of other peoples' private lives. Some of their new students are worse than even Rahne used to be, but without the excuse of being a brainwashed basket case who didn't know any better. God, she missed Rahne. She'd be the perfect person to have tell these little idiots off. Or at least to convince Idie that they didn't all need to atone for the sin they committed by being born. Or to explain to Jean that no, she was not trying to encourage her to live a life of sin, when she approached her about birth control.

"And that's why you tricked her into getting stoned with you, and made her watch _Ginger Snaps_ and listen to Pussy Riot?"

Of course, Kitty likely got more out of that escapade than Jean did. Her metabolism might have a had unique relationship with alcohol and other central nervous system depressants, but not so much when it came to getting really, really, high. It turns out you're actually not supposed to smoke marijuana if you're on tricyclic antidepressants. Unless you actually _want _to induce a bipolar episode and start hallucinating. Who knew?

"That's what I miss about you, Shan. It's so nice to be understood by people, once in a while. It was actually a Riot grrrl mix, though, and she _had_ to be baked for it, otherwise her sixties indoctrination would have gotten in the way and prevented me from saving her."

"But all you've done is made her afraid of accepting food from other people. And you are the worst person _imaginable_ to teach that girl how to be a woman."

"Excuse you? I'm a college graduate, I teach math, physics, and computer science full time, I was drafted into military service with SHIELD, I spent my entire adolescence traveling through time and other dimensions, I fight intergalactic warlords for a living, and I have my own successful side career as a security analyst. Forget any of that?"

"What I remember is, way back when, Emma would kidnap the New Mutants every other week. And then she'd tie you up, stage some ludicrous temptation drama, and try to corrupt you; but it would always fail, because _her_ idea of dark desires and hidden fantasies are actually much tamer than _yours_."

"Oh come on, like that's even difficult. Emma just likes role reversal shit and being a dominatrix—S&amp;M stopped being kinky before we were even old enough to know what it was. And I've heard about some of _your_ wild exploits, and trust me, she's tame compared to you too."

"I'm not kinky."

"You made me dirty talk to you once in a Ruthenian accent."

"I did not!"

"Yes you did!"

"Was I drunk?"

Yuh-huh, she nodded.

"Than its your own fault for going along with it. And frankly that just proves that you're too neurotic to be Jean's principle source of information on cultural integration."

"If not me than who? Betsy? She's still crazy. Rahne? Missing. Rogue? Soon to be jailed for strangling Alex Summers. Emma? A fugitive. Ororo?_ Hah._"

"I don't know! But there must be someone out there—someone who doesn't perform medical experiments on her own students."

"_Whazhat_? Are you talking about Hisako? That was nothing—"

"You gave her glucose pills and told her they would help her PMS!"

"She was on daily birth control! She didn't even _have_ PMS! Its not even possible!" Kitty paused. "And what about you, little miss innocent? Possessing your fellow faculty members, violating the sacred trust of teacher and librarian, and making them rearrange their desks. All just so you can overcome the void in your soul by making innocent teachers think that they're _crazy_."

"You can't prove I did that."

"The hell I can't! I taped it! Those glazed out looks on your victims' faces and and their glowing magenta eyes tell all tales. That video of Remy trying to find his cards, I could watch that on loop forever. You're so amazing."

"I made him staple the inside of the box to the underside of his desk."

"I know! That's something I might do to him! Its like we're soul mates."

* * *

**12.**

"Hey Kitty, what ever happened to that boy?"

"Which one?"

"Fallon. He's the only one you never talk about."

"Oh, he dumped me."

She hadn't thought about Rigby in a while. Awesome guy, good friend. Too nice.

They exchanged emails during the incident with the Logan and the Hand, and he'd sent her a card while she was in recovery after getting pulled out of that Bullet, but otherwise they'd had little contact in years.

That had been a strange and eye opening relationship.

It was the first time she'd been with anyone, either as a girlfriend or just a friend, that was actually intimidated by her. Not just the killer ninja thing—that, at least, was something he was thrown right into the middle of before they'd managed to get much further than first names—but also the issue of rank. He'd been a newly promoted Level 2 analyst, still a bit out of his depth, and she'd been recruited directly out of the EU's answer to the Avengers. And on top of that, she'd spent most of her time consulting with Fury, Bridge, and Hill directly on her ideas for improving network security and stability on the Helicarrier.

"_He _dumped _you_?"

"Experimental mishap in bed, he didn't take it well."

"What does that even mean?"

What Kitty could have said, but didn't, was _I slept with him, _experimentally_, to see if my boyfriend would break up with me when I told him about it. And then they both broke up with me._

"I punched him in the face," she said, instead.

It felt more-or-less like the truth, at least as Xi'an read it.

"That would do it."

"Hey, it wasn't _intentional_. We did some things we were maybe not ready for, and something shocked me."

"And you like to punch people when they shock you."

"Exactly!" Kitty said. "Hey, I learned my lesson. No more using people when I want to experiment."

It reminded Xi'an of possessing one of the hummingbirds that were out during the summer months, the feeling that she felt flashing through her, at that. She had to shake her head and laugh.

Yet for an unexpected, unsought, moment it almost tempted Xi'an to think that something actually _was_ about to happen again, all over again. Except... Kitty was the kind of girl that only pretended that she was drunk, so that she could make out with her friends—without needing to feel ashamed of herself for not being a Good Russian Girl like her mother always wanted. And she had already admitted that she wasn't as drunk as she wanted to be for that night.

And it was only just for a moment, and one soon passed. Always too soon.

She always felt like something was about to happen, but then it never did. To say one thing for Kitty, at least she knew when to kill a mood before bad things happened.

"Its getting late. Early. Where's your hotel?"

"Don't have one."

"You don't have one? So what, you've just been sleeping in the streets for two days?"

A long pause.

"You really haven't been to sleep, have you?" Xi'an asked.

"I was asleep for three years. I think I've already had all the sleep I can take."

They both walked for a long while longer, not really saying anything, until Xi'an tugged on Kitty's hand to stop them both.

"Kitty, lets just go home."

"Don't have one anymore. Ororo has the Headmistress' suite. And I let Jean have my new room. What am I supposed to do, crash with Rachel?"

"Kitty, that's not true. You do have a home. We're in Chicago, remember?"

Kitty looked at her oddly.

"Didn't you pay our lease through for five years?" Xi'an asked.

* * *

**13.**

It didn't take as long as she had feared it might, in that snow, to make it back to their old building. Even though much of it had not yet been cleared—and in some places the snow had not been cleared at all—Kitty was able to keep them both phased, which let them walk unencumbered as if there was nothing crowding in front of them. And Xi'an, again, struggled to tell herself that it meant nothing that Kitty had let their fingers interlace, flesh passed intangibly through the wool of Xi'an's mitten; as they walked home together late at night, after joking around outside of a bar. And she tried to put the knowledge out of her mind that, if all she wanted to do was keep them both phased, Kitty could have just held her wrist.

"There's no one watching," Xi'an confirmed. She was always linking herself into the perceptions of the animals, and even some of the people, within a few blocks around her. It was only a very light possession, nothing invasive—she didn't get any of their thoughts. She only received perceptions, but it was still enough to keep her out of trouble. It had saved her life more than once back in Madripoor, when she still had a price on her head.

Neither one of them had their keys with them, having not expected to go back, and the building didn't have a night security desk. So, Kitty had to phase them in if they wanted to avoid making a commotion. They just walked into the north alley between their building and the next, and Xi'an put her arm over Kitty's left shoulder, and the other beneath her other arm, and interlaced her hands around her back. When Xi'an was ready, Kitty just hugged her around her waist, phased until she could no longer feel gravity pulling down against them, and softly pressed off the ground with a loose jump. Her aim was correct, finding the both of them phasing through the outer facade at the eighteenth floor, and into the north side stairwell. After taking a second for Xi'an to adjust, and regain her bearings, they slipped through the door and into the hallway of the main building.

Floor eighteen had been the original penthouse, and their landlord, Dylan's, apartment was among the others on the level. Kitty and Xi'an had lived one floor higher, in a partitioned-off attic space converted into lofts a few years before they moved in. The side stairs and elevators were only designed to go up to the penthouse floor, and they would have to walk through the hallway to the central stair tower in the middle of the building. It was the only one that actually went up to their apartment, and some of the older treads creaked beneath Xi'an's feet, though not so for Kitty.

They both left their boots at the door. Xi'an's winter boots were crusted in half-thawed and re-frozen snowflakes and ice chips. Kitty's pixie boots looked slightly damp, but otherwise had gave no outward sign that she had been trudging around in the snow all weekend. Yet another reason why Xi'an was secretly (or maybe openly) a little jealous of Kitty's mutation and its every day utility.

Of course, it wasn't like she didn't get to have fun with her own, as well.

(Like making every bird in Chicago circle the Quad Club, after Tom finished his Hitchcock movie marathon.)

More than half of the old furniture was gone, when they closed the door behind them, both of them standing in that loft at the same time for the first occasion in nearly four years. Xi'an had moved most of it to her new house, when she left to accept the Professor's job offer. But still, even with the chairs and dining table and the couch all missing, and to Kitty's willfully imperfect memory, it looked exactly the same as it had on the day she left.

"I've been paying for a cleaning service," Xi'an said, by way of explanation at the relative lack of dust, for an apartment no one had lived in for so long. She had felt like it was her job to take care of the upkeep—Kitty did enough paying out the lease and by buying all of the furniture in the first place. And its not like Xi'an couldn't afford it.

Kitty only snickered. There they were, a couple of rich kids—a banker's daughter and a billionaire—whining about how bad their lives were.

"But I haven't been keeping the kitchen stocked. I don't think there's anything leftover that's edible," Xi'an said. "Were you hungry? If you didn't have anything earlier, I could run to the store..."

"Xi'an...I haven't eaten since I got off that Bullet..."

_I feel like I'm still out there. _

"So what you're saying is, I should bring back ice cream?" Xi'an asked, unwavering and impassive.

Kitty couldn't help but give a nervous smile in return.

"Yeah...sure. That sounds good."

She grabbed her boots again and headed out, making sure the door was unlocked when she left. She trudged off to the corner store as quickly as possible, knowing that Kitty was probably sulking and falling to pieces back in the loft.

* * *

**14.**

Back at the apartment, Kitty was doing better than she thought she'd be. Probably better than she deserved to be, if she were honest with herself.

What a week.

A crazy, crazy, week.

Ending up locked in a battle of wills with the Apocalypse Seed in the midst of Bobby trying to freeze the human race was only a capstone. She had Hank recklessly endangering the time stream without consulting any of the experts first. Had to babysit Logan on his misguided hunt for Mystique. She had John Sublime to deal with, and invasions by sentient alien microbes to fight off. Even an evil circus or two to fight off.

She'd really planned to spend the entire weekend drunk and screaming at strangers, but everyone kept getting in the way. First Lockheed following her everywhere, and then Xi'an showing up. All of the texts and emails the others had left her... not to mention Doug and Warlock hacking her phone the night before (leave it to Doug to sweet-talk the security AI). She'd just been walking without direction when first Warlock's, and then Doug's, voice come out over speaker to ask her if she was alright.

She'd spent all night, phased halfway into a roof so she could have some privacy, letting them just talk to her about anything and everything... X-Men gossip, MI-13 gossip, recent space adventures, recent inventions and tinkerings, lousy action movies, even the money she probably still owed them.

She'd had made her own money when she was a teenager, selling custom mobile apps and macros. It was something she had been doing for fun since she was twelve. She'd ended up with two years of really wonderful collaboration with Doug, and everything they built together was still accruing interest and residuals, in a bank account that he didn't have access to anymore. She had really only worked as a bartender in college because she wanted to be able to tell people she did something really fun for a living, instead of 'I write code for smart phones' or just making up crap about being a trust fund baby to explain her money. Honesty was overrated anyway.

Honesty. Well, as far as honesty went, the way things had gone for her lately probably did have something to do with a lack of that.

She'd been thinking about what she'd talked about with Doop. It was weird, how easy it was to write someone off when you couldn't understand them—and how easily they could blindslide you once that changed.

She'd probably never felt more dishonest with someone, even including Pete and Rachel, than she had with good old Robert Drake. She didn't like the impression she'd given him of who she was, and maybe she only had herself to blame for that.

She'd had a good time with Bobby, but they were both better off without the other. He was honestly one of the the best casual dates she'd ever had; they didn't 'click' as well as either of them would have liked, but when they kept it casual, it was a lot of fun. She didn't meet many guys that were willing to jump out of planes without a parachute, or help her fight a tornado with their fists, or go magma diving in Indonesia, just for shits and giggles.

And she wasn't about to start complaining about the sex.

But then they started looking at things beyond just the casual, and got into dangerous territory, when he started looking for more. Everyone always starts looking for more—why can't they just be happy with what she's actually looking to give? It's not like it ever works out either. People always say they want to know more about her, but they really don't. Just look at Pete or Rachel—they went running for the hills as soon as they got what they asked for. Lockheed and Xi'an were the only two who hadn't, and she could still see the disappointment in them. And Illyana... well, Illyana.

Bobby didn't start to fall in love with _her_, he fell in love with Kitty Pryde, the sexy computer teacher and homebody. Not Katherine Pryde, the badass revolutionary soldier. He started falling for the surface, and not for the glimpses he got of the person underneath. And wasn't that just her fault, if that had happened, yet again?

And then Pete had called her out of the blue—he hadn't said, but it was too much of a coincidence for her not to believe that Warlock had asked him to. It was in retrospect a little surprising that he hadn't called days sooner. He'd obviously caught Alex's speech and wanted to know if they'd all lost their minds.

What was she even doing there? As Xi'an had asked.

She hadn't had much of an answer for Pete either.

The truth was she had _liked_ being a teacher, and she had _liked_ her part in running the old school, no matter how often she argued with Emma and Scott about the best thing for their students. When Logan offered her a chance to do things _their_ way, it really had sounded like an awesome opportunity. She had just never considered that Logan's way wasn't her way. Logan and Scott didn't just differ on their methods, but on their basic ideology, and she just ignored that in her eagerness to put some literal distance from her problems with Piotr and Magik.

(Yeah, sorry Piotr Nikolaievitch. I lived out three years of story-time in an alternate reality torture scenario created by a genocidal loon. But we were married and had kids and maybe I got a little confused after that whole adrift-in-space-for years thing? Thanks for your understanding? How about we call it even, this time, and skip you trying to kill someone I love in a jealous rage?)

She'd known on some level, but taken a long time to consciously accept, how different her own class of X-Men were from those who came after. Xavier and Erik were the real revolutionaries, and Scott had inherited it from them. But Logan, Hank, and Ororo didn't want a revolution. They weren't fighting for change that could benefit everyone. They were fighting to keep things the same. To fit in, to be seen and not heard, as if mutants being different were the problem. They were fighting for conformity—and why shouldn't they? Logan was a nice guy, and she loved the dude like a brother, but he was also a crabby old man on the best of days.

He only understood the physical injustices of violence and deprivation. Emotional and social injustices were just a different concept to a man of his time. He thought the way to prevent suffering was to fight for the common good. And she could get behind that, except his common good was the status quo _thirty years ago_, and maybe he just didn't understand why people who seemed like they were nice and quiet and satisfied, just the other day, should be clamoring for change they don't really need when they had only _just_ ended a war. She knew he wasn't a bad person for thinking that way, he just didn't _get_ where the rest of them are coming from.

He led a life that made no apologies for who he was, true, but its not hard to do that when you're already like everyone else.

Hank, Alex, and Ororo could just be happy on top of the world, content in the knowledge that the children will grow up to be the way they think that children should be.

Not to mention the incredibly short-sighted us-against-them mentality that they had all had been fostering. Hadn't her family had enough of tribalism in the last century to last her a few millennia? Had to flee Europe as ethnic and political undesirables. Had to change their name in the United States because they weren't the right kind of white for the privileged Anglo-Saxon majority. She'd personally had to move to the East Coast and then to the UK to get away from just the mutant issue—but then it just kept chasing her back and forth across the Atlantic.

But even in the more subtle ways, she'd felt that pressure towards conformity for most of her life, and didn't wish it on the kids. But it wasn't like she could just change the locks next time Logan went to the store for cigars, and take over.

She couldn't just leave and take everyone under thirty with her.

Her father and grandparents had just wanted a little princess to spoil. Her mother wanted a pretty doll she could dust off a few times a year for recitals and dancing _kolomyjka _to impress her weird friends, and having a genius for a daughter wasn't part of her plan. A chess prodigy, sure, but not a daughter who read about Tony Stark in the magazines, and wanted to break down old components and solder together a supercomputer from a box of junk.

It was always like that, being stuffed into a box that she couldn't escape. Wandering too close to an edge she never saw, and being shoved in. Whether her age, or her gender, or her ethnicity, intellect, sexual identity, or the national borders that she or her ancestors were born on the wrong side of. People that believe in conformity, in keeping your head down, always saw things about her that didn't compute and tried to discipline her out of them. Wanted her to grow up and act the right way. People like that just didn't understand paradoxes and exceptions, even though they existed all around them. Even when it was something as simple cutting her hair to see if it _looked_ better, some asshole wanted to figure out what it meant about her.

It was just_ weird_ that she liked Seattle sound and grindcore, but loved Chaykovsky and Taneyev at the same time—not to mention jazz and metal and even old disco novelty records. Was it really that crazy that she liked motorcycles and mixed marital arts, but also danced ballet _and_ used to be a cheerleader? It came off as an anomaly if most of her friends were men or were older than her or both, so a certain percentage of people jump to the asinine conclusion that she's just _that_ girl in the office—and not that these are just the people she works with.

Can't be a feminist and have a sex life. Can't be a band groupie and a good student. Can't be Masorti _and_ be an atheist. Can't be a traditionalist without being a bigot. Too young to fight. Too immature to have autonomy. Too old to play sports or to like comic books and arcades.

And, as everyone knows, there's just no such thing as a straight girl that's attracted to other girls.

There were compromises to free expression, sure. She could definitely go too far. There was a certain common denominator of human experience that she had to stick close to, most of the time, at least in public. She might go through plenty days where she doesn't know if she feels more Polish-American than Russian-Ukrainian, or where she feels more like Ogun's student than Carmen Pryde's daughter, or more like a SHIELD agent than an X-Man, but if she just walked around mixing English with Surzhyk, or Skrull with German, or Hebrew with French, or Russian with Japanese, then no one would be able to understand what she was saying.

She still didn't really have a clear frame of reference for anything—it all seemed too fluid. She'll go back and forth from "straight" to "questioning" to "whatever." Sometimes she feels like she grew up in New York or London, and other times like she's from a small house outside of Kyoto. She may have accepted the part of her that was shaped and molded by Ogun, but that didn't make it any less confusing when she tried to sort out who she was. She never knew from one day to the next what culture she identified with the most, let alone how she feels about silly little things like her actual nationality, or tribal nonsense like who her ancestors were or what language they spoke.

Even without all of the X-Men and Excalibur and Mutant Decimation, aliens and telepaths and demons, soul transfers, and being gang pressed into government and military service, ninja business, living in other times and other dimensions, or being an unwilling host to alien monsters or ancient demons, she hardly knew who she was. And she wasn't any closer to figuring it out, than she was when she first started.

She just felt like brought nothing with her. She had no citizenship to honor and no home country to claim and call her own. She was descended from Russians, who were themselves Jews, Karaites, and Roma, who lived in Poland and Romania and Ukraine and the places along the borderlands that change hands every twenty years. She was brought up in America, England, and a virtually uninhabited island off the coast of Scotland. Even with the exclusion of Limbo, cross-time journeys, and living out whole alternate lifetimes in seconds, she hardly even had a reliable heading to start with.

Why did everything always have to be so loud? Even in her own head.

Maybe sometimes she really did have to water it all down and moderate herself if she wanted people to be able to relate to her. That wasn't hiding herself, right? Not really, anyway. Everyone did that.

But you can only compromise for so long before diluting your basic character. Her family didn't survive the pogroms and Treblinka and Birkenau, and Warsaw, and Babyn Yar, not to mention her own personal horrors with Stryker and the Purifiers or Genosha or having her mind rapedby Cassandra Nova and Nightmare and the Hand and Ogun, or Seth and Courtney using her life as a plaything, just so she could throw it all away letting a bunch of old men afraid of the world changing around them, and a woman that thinks she's a real goddess, and Alex _mother fucking_ Summers, get together and tell her to be quiet and try to fit in. That she can't have her voice be heard.

She knew who her real friends were. Kurt, Xavier, Rahne, Betsy, Erik, Scott, Tom, Dylan, Shola, Stevie, Warlock, Doug, Jean-Paul, Doop, and Moira. Jubilee, who dropped everything so that Xi'an could go chase her down. The only expectation they ever had for her was that she be exceptional. That chaffed at times, but it was a much easier burden to bare than expectation of amounting to nothing and liking it.

Her real family? Those were Pete, Piotr, Madelyne, Leong, Nga, Xi'an, Illyana, Brian, Meggan, and Lockheed. She might just be deluding herself, but she liked to think that they didn't care about what she was. She liked to think that whatever they saw in her, whatever made them care about her, was something authentically within her.

She didn't really know where she stood with Logan and Ororo anymore. There'd been more than one time when Logan had dropped everything to go save her life, and just as many when he left her alone when he thought she needed the struggle. But it was weird—hard to put into words, but not difficult in the way that it was with Lockheed. With Lockheed, there was no single word in any language to encompass their feelings, and they lit up the entire spectrum of human and alien emotion. But with Logan, were they friends? Were they family? One or the other, it to be, but always so hard to tell.

It was worse with Ororo, who she had latched on to as a new parent for a new home, hoping both would be better than the last. It had been unfair, as Ororo had made her realize, to ask that of her. But now there they were, years later with that need reversed, and she with no way to extricate herself from it.

Sometimes you just have to drink and screw around for a few days and see what happens. See where everything wants to go, once it has time to settle.

Her life still sucked, and she had no idea how she could fix it. But it was nice, at least, knowing that it sucked. That all of her relationships were poison, but at least wasn't just her. They were all just as wrong and screwed as she was. Her friends and coworkers could hurt her as much as she could hurt them. So she wasn't just being ungrateful.

Ok, she kind of was. Ungratefulness could be her secondary mutation.

But at least it was their fault too.

* * *

**15.**

Xi'an had only meant to pick up a few pints of ice cream, but on impulse she also grabbed a fresh pack of cigarettes and a dry match book. She hadn't smoked in a while, but Oh Lord, does being Kitty's friend sometimes make you need a little extra help. As soon as she walked back through the door, Xi'an traced the grocery bag into Kitty's fingers, so she could hang up her jacket, and set aside her scarf, mittens, and knit cap. It was just a double-bagged set of clear white plastic, with a generic stock logo. It had a few pints of ice cream, and some complimentary napkins and plastic spoons, on the inside.

It was only when she joined her back on the floor in the living area, that Xi'an noticed the compression sleeve on Kitty's left knee.

"I thought it was your other one?" Xi'an questioned.

Kitty looked down at herself, unsure at first, before she deduced what she meant.

"No, this is different. I sprained my PCL. Last time Lockheed and I were in Japan. Its been bothering me since I got back from... you know."

That was the weird thing about Kitty. She was always getting hurt on the job. She's invulnerable to everyone else, but she seemed to bang up herself just fine. Her, and Illyana, anyway.

"Oh. Stop hurting yourself?"

"Yeah," she said, pausing as Xi'an began to unload the bag in front of her. "I'll work on that."

While Xi'an was gone, she had changed her clothes into a pair of black shorts, and an old Chicago Bears jersey (number fifty-four, home colors—thank you very much). She'd had it since she was a kid—she forgot to pack it when she moved to LA, with Rachel and the others, after finishing up her physics Master's. It was old enough that the pores of the mesh material had frayed slightly, and Xi'an could see the impression of Kitty's bra as well as that of the dragon tattoo covering her upper arm and the back of her shoulder. She wasn't wearing her earrings and the like anymore, either. They were probably laying on a dish or in a jar somewhere—that was what she usually did with them, to keep them all in one place.

"Here—raspberry sorbet for me," Xi'an said, setting the first pint on the ground. "Disgusting powdered-green-tea flavored ice cream for... you, and chocolate mint chip for both of us."

"The word you're looking for is _matcha_, and it tastes amazing," Kitty said, as she accepted it.

She had found a pair of her old thick framed glasses somewhere in the apartment. Those were something she didn't, strictly speaking, need in her every day life—but it was sometimes nice to just rest her eyes for a while. That was another weird thing about Kitty—you'd think she'd get tired of having to squint all the time, and just wear her glasses. Or at least buy some contact lenses. Maybe she was just paranoid about accidentally pushing them through her eyes?

Still, Kitty looked good that way, Xi'an thought, between the glasses and having tied up her chestnut colored hair into a loose, messy, ponytail.

Kitty had taken the time alone to set up a space heater on the ground in front of the TV set while Xi'an was gone, and dug out a set of blanket and a futon and laid them out on the floor. It reminded Xi'an a little too much of Kitty's old apartment, the one she had of the lower floors, before they had decided to move in together. She hadn't even had a bed, to make more room for office space. How Kitty could spend her life just rolling a cushion out of the linen closet and calling that a job well done was beyond her, and was evidently a habit she still hasn't been broken of.

"Cold, going to be _so cold_," Xi'an... well, she guessed it was technically a whine after all. She was just lucky Leong and Nga weren't there to see it. "Don't we have anything warmer?"

When they started to get settled down, and Xi'an had popped off her prosthetic leg and set it aside so that she would be more comfortable, and just changed into a dry long sleeved shirt and sweatshirt, and a pair of night pants that she (annoyingly) had to hold up around the stub of her left leg with a safety pin. It was obviously not practical to just hang around in damp winter wear, though she didn't have any of her other clothes with her, so she would have to make due with what they had. Most of what was left in the apartment were the vestiges of Kitty's things, and some duplicate pieces of furniture and appliances. Kitty, knowing she'd need something to wear, had scrounged up what she could for her. Even so, she found herself quite-well ridiculously cold, even with the heater on.

The ice cream party was going to kill her—but she did kind of want it anyway.

"I've got a few yukata sets, want me to help you into one?"

"Ugh._ Yes_, but I'd probably trip and kill myself the first time I tried to stand up," she said, as she sprawled herself out in a huff.

"Shan...what are you even doing here? Why aren't you with your family?" Kitty asked, once had been sitting for a while, watching an old _Space Ghost_ DVD. They had removed the shade from an old lamp, and were sitting underneath its light. "You can't fix me with a few scoops of ice cream."

Xi'an thought back to Tran, to her mother and the boat to America, to Farouk, losing the twins and finding them again, but finding them wrong, and to Da'o and their father.

"I'm not trying to fix you, Kitty. There's not enough ice cream in the world to fix the both of us. I just miss you, that's all. I miss spending time with you, just doing stupid things all night."

"Okay," Kitty said at length.

"Okay?"

"Yeah. I think I can handle that."

They watched on for a while, though Xi'an found herself distracted by other things. Some fancy caught her thoughts, and she found herself playing with Kitty's sleeve, and tracing her nails across the exposed edge of her dragon tattoo. She'd always heard that Jews couldn't be buried in their own communities if they were tattooed—

"That's a myth," Kitty said. Xi'an hadn't even noticed their thoughts leaking together. "And I'm Masorti, anyway, so its not really a problem unless you're my mother. And as far as dad's rabbi is concerned, Karaites aren't Jewish; I'm converted, and she's not—so the hell with what she thinks."

In Japan on the other hand tattoos were still associated with criminality—so maybe Kitty having a dragon tattoo _could_ be seen as a kind of adolescent rebellion. Yes, part rebellion—and part just memorializing a friend she had once thought she had lost. There was still a story to Lockheed's once disappearance that neither he nor Kitty had shared with her. Maybe they would one day.

"Movie's almost over," Xi'an said, glancing at the LED timer on the media player.

Kitty responded by picking up a Blu-ray box, and flipping it over so Xi'an could see the cover art for _Jingle Cats Christmas_.

"You're out of your mind. Nothing could make me sit through that."

"I can go buy us some drugs."

"I think we can try a little bit harder before we have to plum those depths."

"But Leong bought it for you!"

"He's not here."

"But we still have to do _something_, right?" she asked, and Xi'an could feel her already growing restless. It wasn't her usual, dangerous, restlessness—the birth seed of a lifetime of imprudent decisions, as her mind cycled on without direction—but was rather more an encroaching boredom.

She liked to think that it was why things had once gone so smoothly between them. Kitty's reckless, injudicious (bit somehow still overthought) decision making, complimentarily weighed down by her own habitual indecisiveness. Or maybe it was just her turn to start overthinking things, this time.

When, finally, they both went nuts and decided to play _Mario Kart 8_ while yelling at each other like idiots, the only surprising thing was that it took them nearly until five o'clock—almost an hour and a half before sunrise—before they started.

Xi'an, while completely covered in blankets to stave off the bitter cold, had the carton of mint chip laying next to her knee. She would occasionally put the Wii Wheel down to grab some. There was a bit of bright green contamination frosted to the side of spoon, which was planted in the pint-sized tub, from where she had accidentally grabbed the one one. It was too cold for Xi'an, so she wasn't surprised when she started actually shivering, teeth clattering, while she was eating her ice cream. The cashier had actually called her stupid when she bought it—this was where her life had finally taken her.

She was a billionaire single-mother battle-hardened superheroine, and the smelly drunk working the graveyard shift at the gas station convenience store was looking down at her.

(But at least she had ice cream. _Mmmm_.)

(But it's still so cold.)

She was sitting on Kitty's lap, the result of a compromise between Xi'an's need for neutral body heat and Kitty's delusional belief that Xi'an sitting to her side would give her some kind of esoteric advantage in playing split-screen.

They'd finally found a way to make that comfortable, and Kitty's right leg was half-on-top of her's, while her left arm was over Xi'an's shoulder. She was playing with her other arm wrapped across Xi'an's waist, and was essentially hugging her, to hold on to her WaveBird Controller. She had a spoon stuck in her mouth, and was trying to lick the last few smears of ice cream off while she played, without it just falling out of her mouth—and onto Xi'an's lap—while she licked.

As usual Kitty was basically cheating, because of course she was—could never just be satisfied with being better on her own merits. A split-screen setup was a terrible idea, when Kitty's concentration was good enough for her to just look at both at the same time, and always move at just the right time to evade the Shy Guy's green shells. But that was ok with Xi'an, because they had lived together for long enough that their psychic report was basically perfect, and she could just lightly possess her to always know what she was planning just as she thought of it. She would always be ready to cut ahead of Rosalina at the next turn.

Or maybe she shouldn't call their connection 'psychic,' when every time she let herself drift into Kitty's mind (or rather, whenever Kitty opened a door for her and let her in), Lockheed was already there. Kitty's heart was an awful lot like their apartment, in a strange way. Living space for Kitty, Lockheed, and Xi'an herself, plus a little bit of a spare, disused, bedroom for Wisdom that hadn't been cleaned out or dusted in years. Kitty formed connections with people so easily that it was hard to rule out that they might be two way—was empathy really a characteristic of Lockheed's species, or just some quality of Kitty herself? That raw, wounded, emotional scab tissue covering what used to be her feelings for Illyana, Peter, Douglas, and Rachel seemed too clean in spite of its roughness to not have been deliberately spackled over her.

"What are you doing?" Kitty asked, setting her spoon aside, while steering with her free hand, as Xi'an poked her.

"Poking you," Xi'an said, while waiting for her kart to be reset after going off track. She had been continually poking her arm whenever she was not occupied with the screen.

"Why?" Kitty asked, as Xi'an's Shy Guy started accelerating again.

"Don't know." It was just something she always felt like doing, whenever Kitty wasn't wearing long sleeves. "You're so tiny, and you still have so much muscle definition. How did you do that? You never go to gyms."

"Lots of capoeira and break dancing," she trailed off, while pausing to lap the computer. "And all the freerunning. Gymnastics. Even cheerleading, I guess. Anything where you have to lift and hold your own body weight all the time."

Kitty, at least, finally felt like she was starting to relax; she had stopped blinking after Rosalina's first few laps, and her heart rate and breathing had slowed down to what Xi'an could only guess was an unguarded, natural, rate for Kitty. It was hard to tell. Even before the Bullet, she'd always been a bit different that way, not that most people would notice it. There couldn't be anyone else in that school that put more effort into putting people at ease. Kitty even used to practice blinking the right way, in front of her mirror.

She caught a good look at Kitty's left foot on an incidental glance. Years later and her skin was still a little discolored from where she had let Logan stab her. She didn't have a lot of visible scarring, and the incision marks from the surgery she went through to repair bone and ligament damage had faded, but adamantium has always been a little different from other metals.

But speaking of Logan, that gave her an idea.

"You know... if you really want to get back at Logan..." Xi'an begun, as a red Koopa shell ricochet veered sharply away from Rosalina's kart.

"Hmm-mm?" Kitty mumbled, licking off an area on the underside of her top lip that had been bothering her.

"You should ban him from using your ninja skills," she continued, narrowing her sights on Kitty's kart and lining her up for her remaining red shell. "You told me you were Ogun's heir. So its _your_ school, right?"

Kitty laughed crazily, and Xi'an could feel the cavalcade of conflicting thoughts and the bright mania of the fireworks going off in Kitty's head as she considered it.

"Oh my God! I could really do that! 'Logan-_han_, _Enishidou-ryuu taijutsu_ belongs to me and my students. You can't have it.' He would _so _flip his shit!"

But then, the excitement sobered.

"I mean, he'd never listen to me. He doesn't take me seriously enough to listen to me. He still sees me and Jubilee as his kid sidekicks. I was never his sidekick, but whatever. Neither was Hisako, but its the same for her—save his ass all the time and her reward is jokes about being the new Jubilee. He used to tease me about how I could 'go all ninja' on him, as if I couldn't _actually_ choke him to death or pull his heart out of his chest."

"Yes... that's probably true..." Xi'an considered, as Shy Guy closed in for the kill on Rosalina.

"That just gives me extra cause!" Kitty said.

"What?"

"Dude, I can _challenge him to a duel!_ For disrespecting me, _and_ for using _my_ ninjutsu without my permission."

"You're actually serious, aren't you?"

"Hell yeah! Guy has a healing factor and metal bones. He can stand to get beat on for a while. At least until I have _satisfaction_."

"Sometimes I'm not sure you remember that you weren't actually raised in nineteenth century Japan."

"Half of me was," Kitty said, as Xi'an lined up her kart to fire off her shell.

But then Kitty just leaned forward and distracted her by biting down on the side of her ear, and tugging her head to the side. Xi'an yelped as she was pulled away from looking at the screen, and Kitty intentionally allowed Rosalina to lag behind so that she could drop a banana peel directly on top of the Shy Guy.

_"You bitch!"_ Xi'an shouted, as she lost control and spun out.

Kitty just laughed and pumped her fist.

"Mario Kart Champ—" but then Xi'an cut her off by slamming down on her brain with a deeper, more invasive, possession and overriding her nervous system. She forced Kitty to detach her molecules from the Earth's gravity, and she went flying through the wall as the planet's daily rotation caught up with her.

Xi'an caught her breath and felt her heart jump in excitement, and she tightened her grip on her Wii Wheel—Rosalina had driven off the road, and Shy Guy was back on course.

But then nothing happened, even as she held down on the button.

"Oh! No fair!" Xi'an said.

The light on the remote was dead. Kitty had shorted it out, phasing through it before she lost control—and now Xi'an couldn't advance toward the finish line.

She scrambled around, falling into the world's least dignified crawl after darting forward towards the console, looking for a spare controller. She finally found one only to shake it in frustration when it failed to turn on—realizing only than that the weight felt off. It was missing batteries.

She fumbled through tearing an AA package opened to replace them, her cold fingers not quite making it the first time, and then impatiently failing to click the remote opened. It was only when she succeeded, and pressed the button to reset the new remote for second player, that Kitty charged back through their outer wall and tackled her.

They struggled, switching the remote between first and second player, while incrementally advancing their karts toward the end of the course.

"_Ah! _Stop—!" Xi'an called out as Kitty wrestled her into an omoplata lock and captured the remote with her free hand. "You idiot! I'm missing a foot! You're killing my kne—"

Kitty just smiled contentedly as Rosalina crossed the finish line, and celebrated on screen. She phased Xi'an out of the lock she'd put her under, and just leaned down against her, letting her face brush against her shoulder. Xi'an had such shiny, shiny, hair—she'd always loved the feel of it. It was so different from her own (or Illyana's, or Rachel's, or Sarah's).

"You are the biggest idiot," Xi'an said, from beneath her.

"We're both idiots," Kitty said, still smiling.

* * *

**16.**

Kitty's set her game controller aside. She was starting to get bored with Mario Kart.

"How do you deal with them?"

"Who? Parents? X-Men? Senior Staff? I don't really have to talk to them as often as you do. I don't really have personal relationships with them like you do... they weren't my team. Its just professional between us. We're all teachers. And sometimes we have missions. They didn't raise me, so I don't really know how to help you."

"They didn't raise me either," Kitty reminded her. "They just like to pretend they did."

"Is that what's bothering you?" Xi'an twisted around in her lap, fiddling with Kitty's glasses and how they sat on the tip of her tiny snub nose.

"Well, yeah. All the time, beneath the surface. But there's other things." Other things that are harder to pretend don't exist when you're in my lap and wearing my clothes, she didn't say (but her brain did).

"Like what?"

"Right now? Its stupid."

"A lot of the things that bother us are silly. For example: you bit me so you could win a game. People are just stupid. I haven't figured out how to make them less stupid."

"You could though. If you wanted to."

"I suppose that might be true, but I try not to worry about it anyway."

Kitty took a deep breath. It just passed through her skin, and flowed back out of her.

"Shan? You said you missed me. You missed spending time with me? I did too... but I also miss _her_."

Xi'an didn't even need to ask. She never needs to be a telepath to know.

Illyana. It was always Illyana.

Kitty hadn't really been 'Kitty' in a long time, and maybe she never would be again, for as long as she had been without her Illyana.

"Kitty, just talk to her," Xi'an said, exasperated, but in a way also relieved that Kitty had at least brought it up. "If you miss her, then talk to her. You could just talk to her. She's waiting for you. She misses you—she can't do anything to hide how much she misses you. Anyone with eyes could see it."

Kitty's eyes just unfocused, like she was either dead, or focusing on picturing something that was in another world.

"That isn't Illyana, Shan. She's a nice girl. Maybe in another world I could have been friends with her. But she's not Illyana."

She was just a copy. She was certainly a human being in her own right, and she didn't have anything really _against _her, but she was still not Illyana despite sharing her name. She was someone completely different. Kitty was willing to work with her, and tolerated her for the sake of Piotr and the New Mutants, and maybe they could even be friends someday. After all, she could be friends with both Doug and Douglock—hell, she was friends with Maddie, and now she's friends with Jean. She knew it wouldn't be a betrayal to be close with the new Illyana—but all the same, that was emphatically not _her_ Illyana.

"Kitty, listen to me. What if it were Tran? If it were him... if it were _my twin_ that came back... It wouldn't matter to me. It would be a second chance, and I'd take it. And it wouldn't matter to me if he was a copy or a clone or from another universe. Not if he looked like him and sounded like him and smelled like him, if he had his memories and thought like him, because if he were everything that my brother was, than what would be the difference? If there was nothing about him that would keep me from feeling that way again, then how could I say he wasn't really exactly who he seemed like?"

"Piotr tried to tell me the same thing," Kitty said.

"He's her brother, wouldn't he know? Doesn't it mean anything to you, that Peter still considers her his sister? As far as he's concerned, she's just another of the ones that came back."

"Piotr never really knew her—not after Limbo. He knew the little girl that we had to rescue from Arcade and Belasco...but I'm not sure he even wanted to know the person she grew into. Hardly ever had time for her until she was gone. So he just sees that she remembers most of the things that Illyana remembered. She talks like her. She laughs like her. That's good enough for Piotr. If he's willing to let her use his sister to manipulate him, that's his business. But I need more than that."

"But she has Illyana's Soulsword. Doesn't that mean she also has her soul?"

"It means she has her _magic_. Its better not to think of it as a soul, because not _everyone_ has that same 'glow.' Trust me, I've watched too many people drive themselves insane over this. Take Stryker. I knew him back when he was still decent—misguided, sure, and belonged in jail, but he was still decent. Some people can see magic, or psychic potential, or even someone's mutation. They always end up labeling it 'the soul' and wondering why most people don't have one. It always poisons everything."

"Kitty, you need to let this go. Its going to drive you crazy."

"God," she huffed, in exasperation. "That's just what she told me. Its one of the benefits of being a time traveler, right? You can just hop in, years later, and check in on all of your friends before checking out for good. And I tried, ok? I _tried_ to move on—and every time I did I just lost everything I had. And why should I? So what if I'm just pining after what I can't have. Why should I _move on_ when what I had in the first place was perfect? Would _you_ be here, right now, if you didn't feel exactly the same way about me that I feel about Illyana?"

And that was probably it. They understood each other a little bit more, but Xi'an suspected that Kitty already knew that. Maybe Kitty was being a bit kinder to her than she gave her credit for—or maybe she was giving Kitty too much credit and needed to stop before doing disservice to herself.

"I love her, Shan. And I miss her. I miss her, Shan. And I'm never going to see her again."

People—fellow X-Men, SWORD and SHIELD allies, even transient strangers—always thought that Kitty was strong because of the bravery or the willpower that she exhibited in life and death situations. But always running into danger to complete your mission wasn't the same thing as bravery. Biting through the pain wasn't the same thing as willpower. It was easy to face death when you didn't have a reason to keep living in the first place. And anyone who thought Kitty had never run away from a fight, didn't know very much about ninjas—they only fight the battles they already know they'll win.

And they always avoid the others when they feel them coming.

Any woman who has had the same nightmares, every time she's gone to sleep, since she was fourteen years old had to be running away from something.

Yet, at that nonetheless, Xi'an had to feel like that was one of those rare opportunities, and Kitty didn't give one very many, to actually help her for the better. Sometimes you have to just keep needling her until you break through, and force her to really confront her issues instead of just hiding from them.

But she didn't know how to say it. Didn't know how to tell Kitty that the question of whether this Illyana was the real Illyana was irrelevant. That the Illyana that Kitty only thought she remembered never existed in the first place. She was just someone that Kitty made up one day, another mask that Kitty created, only this time for her friend. Something to make her feel a little less lonely in her soul, and if Illyana was too dead to object to it, more was the better. Kitty's Illyana was no more real than the person that Kitty herself pretended to be.

And even if she could make Kitty see reality, _should_ she? It might be nicer to Peter and Illyana, but would it help _Kitty_? Would Kitty's life be in any way improved if someone took Illyana away from her?

It wasn't like Kitty even _wanted_ to be 'better.' She was happy enough, most of the time, just being functional.

Maybe that's what it really was. Maybe Kitty's friends were just trapped in the same holding pattern that she was—not knowing how to help her. Knowing that she needed it, that she was screaming for it all the time, but that she'd only resent them more if they offered it. But did any of them even have the right to try? It was Kitty's life. After all of the therapy, medication, and alcoholic binges...if all that she could find to do with her life, was to be miserable in it, who were they to try and stop her?

* * *

**17.**

Even without mutant telepathy, even with her eyes closed, she could have felt Kitty's thoughts

in the dark with the lights off, once they had finally settled down to sleep. It would have been neat to think she could hear it in Kitty's heartbeat or feel it in the awkward warmth her skin, but neither of those options were possible with her. She could just feel it coming on its own, some static of a mood cloying in the air, warning her of the impulse flashing through Kitty's heart. She tried to brace herself towards ignoring it, knowing that Kitty really wouldn't be able to think better of herself.

"Hey Shan?" Barely containing herself, like something utterly brilliant had just occurred to her, and she couldn't wait to share it with the world. There it was, finally rearing its head—Kitty's dangerous restlessness.

Xi'an immediately knew not to trust whatever mischief was driving Kitty. She was so happy it approached mania, but the controlled chaos of her mind was not focused like it would be if she'd actually thought about whatever she's about to say. She could almost call it a sliver of innocence, particularly since Kitty had such an impressive track record for thoughtless cruelty. Xi'an could tell it was going to be a train wreck before Kitty said anything more, but just gave in anyway—she knew it was too late to get around it.

"Kitty?"

"I've wanted to tell you this for a long time... I..."

And that needed to be shut down right away.

"If you tell me that you love me, I'll hit you so hard you'll only _think_ that you're phased."

"Shan..."

"Just go to sleep. I'm sorry that you're bored, but I'm not your toy."

Kitty jerked up, rolling over so that she was partly phased through her, their noses on the cusp of touching.

"But I mean it! People always say it. _Who would choose to be gay?_ To have to deal with all of the judgment and hatred. But I would. The only people I've ever actually felt... I used to think about it. Asking you. Just go into my head. Change things around. We could both finally be happy. And it wouldn't make any difference, right?"

"Stop it," she pulled the covers tighter against her, pulling herself against them, and pulling them through Kitty and her intangible body. It was enough that she could put imaginary space between her and Kitty, there on that floor.

"I could love you. We both know I could. Just switch a few things around, make me forget, Illyana and the rest, it'd be perfect. We deserve it, right?"

She had to bolt up at that. Kitty leaned back against the floor so that their heads wouldn't pass through each other, and Xi'an looked at her as clearly as she could in the darkness.

"_Stop! _Just _stop! _How could you even ask _me_ this? After _everything_."

"Its not... I mean it, Shan—"

"What the hell do you want from me? To just open up your mind and mutilate you? I could erase the first fifteen years of your life, take away the best parts of who you are, and make you forget every nasty thing your mother ever said to you, every time your father ever disappointed you, or every friend you've ever lost. Maybe that would work. We can just kill you and replace you with someone else that looks like you and sounds like you but still thinks and_ feels_ wrong. Is that what you want? Is it? _Is it?_

"Now, please. Kitty, _please_. If you have ever cared about me, at all. Even a little. Shut up. Please, just shut up. Stop talking. And go to sleep."

Only Kitty couldn't.

She wanted to, desperately so, but she couldn't.

"Hey, Shan?"

"Yes?" Again, in resignation.

"Why aren't we together anymore?" Kitty slid against her, to drape herself over her, as Xi'an found herself relaxing against her despite her better judgment.

"Because you're a horrible person," she suggested, immediately.

"Oh," she said, peeling away slightly. "I guess you're probably right."

"At least you're working on it," Xi'an admitted at length.

She flipped herself back over. As usual, Kitty's body seemed to turn itself intangible, offering no conscious resistance. It just knew which parts of itself to turn incorporeal, for Xi'an's best convenience.

"Kitty?" she asked, pulling her back down against her.

"Mmm-hmm?" she mumbled into Xi'an's shoulder, letting her face brush against a few loose strands of her hair.

"Please don't worry about it. I don't think I'm much better. I'm sorry for yelling at you."

"I don't get yelled at often enough. There are a lot of times I should be, but I'm not."

"I think I used you too, Kitty. I'm so sorry. I tried to make you fit into a mold I knew couldn't fit. And you were right—I think I would have ended it if you hadn't. I would have told myself that you were only afraid, and then I would have hurt you like you hurt me."

"I kind of was afraid. I was afraid of a lot of things."

"I know. But not what I thought. Or I did see it... at least, now, I think I did. Maybe I just ignored it. You weren't the only one who was confused. I didn't understand, what was going on. With me. Not for years. After what happened to me... I never thought much of my feelings—or rather of my lack of feelings. I thought something inside of me had just broken. Its different now, I've had space to think. So I know I've always been attracted to women, but at the time... well, you know what its like."

"Yeah. 'Its just a crush.' 'Its just a phase.' 'Its time for you to grow up.'"

"That's right. The first time I realized it was something more... Farouk was a very sick creature. He indulged every impulse to excess. He wasn't hesitant to use my body to take what he wanted from others. My brother was the same way, before I ended him. Before I absorbed him."

"You thought those two were still a part of you?" Kitty asked. She was leaning perched with one of her arms now, her elbow floating a few inches off the ground, and her cheek smushed against her palm.

"Yes. They were both sick. So I thought that I must be as well. That's how sickness works, isn't it? That's what happens when you're exposed to a contagion. It took me a very long time to realize that there was nothing wrong with me."

"There's plenty wrong with you," she said, playing at counting a few strands of Xi'an's hair as they slipped through her fingers.

"With both of us," Xi'an affirmed. "I was only just putting things behind me, really only beginning to straighten my life out, when it happened... between us."

"Yeah... I knew that. But I didn't really make it any easier on you."

"But I didn't for you, either. I'm sorry. I think I just wanted to be normal. It was easier to pretend that you were just like me, like you were just confused about yourself like I was. I didn't even know that people like you existed, but that's my fault, if I hurt both of us because I just ignored the people in front of me for who I wished they were."

"I didn't mind. I liked feeling like someone thought I was normal." Kitty said. And then her eyes squinted, like they always did when she was concentrating, whenever she couldn't quite see something clearly on her own. She had already set her glasses aside when they turned off the lights. "Xi'an? I kind of miss being together."

"I think I do too." Xi'an said. "We need to go to sleep."

"I know. I just can't."

Xi'an thought about that for a moment before deciding.

"Okay." She touched her hand to Kitty's face, and wasn't surprised when she flinched. She couldn't really control it, the way her eyes could glow whenever she focused her mutation too strongly.

"Shh. Don't fight it. Just let me..."

Kitty grudgingly allowed herself to lean into it, without further protest, so that Xi'an's palm was covering her entire cheek and the space around her eye.

"Pleasant dreams," Xi'an wished, and caught her gently as she slumped.

* * *

**18.**

It was at the edge of dawn in Chicago, and there was enough light coming through the blinds to illuminate the two of them entwined together—Kitty twisted against and shading her like her own personal kudzu strangle vine. Even unconscious she could keep both of them phased. It was the first time in days Xi'an didn't feel cold, instead encountering merely a curious emptiness of heat.

Just what was Kitty to her? Xi'an wondered, looking at her as she slept.

Her arms had eventually wrapped themselves around Kitty's shoulders in an ongoing struggle to get comfortable. Kitty's in turn had slipped around her waist, partly through her body, the two of them holding loosely against each other with Kitty lying face down on top of her. She looked empty, which Xi'an ha to admit was probably the best, and most natural, look for her. When she she was empty, at least there was nothing left to weigh her down.

Peter—the older one—had once told her that being in a relationship with Kitty could make him feel like he was abusing her. There was a little of that as well, knowing that you were taking advantage of someone whose emotional problems might just transcend low-self esteem, to reach heights of their own disastrous uniqueness. You had to deal with that, even as she was taking advantage of you, and using you up until there's nothing left for her to use.

"I'm really sorry, Katherine," Xi'an whispered. "But sometimes you look even younger than you think you are."

They were definitely not friends, were they?

That weird domesticity that they had fallen into... trading turns cooking for the kids, parent teacher conferences, splitting up Leong and Nga's after-school activities between each other, paying bills... do friends do those things for each other? Maybe, but she'd never had any other friends living with her like that, so she couldn't be sure. They weren't lovers either, that much was obvious—from a lack of progress, instead of from disqualifying actions.

So why did she even let herself end up there?

Other than to be used all over again, and to just let it happen to her.

To use Kitty again as well, and tell herself that she wasn't.

She was letting herself fall back into the same trap as the last time. Sleeping with Kitty, bodies twisted beneath the same sheets. Pretending that it meant something, anything at all, to the girl in her bed. Pretending that Kitty cared about anything but the feel of another human being. It would be easy to just delude herself into feeling some reciprocation of intimacy, into a fiction that it wasn't just about hiding from the loneliness. It would be easy to go along with it, to take what she needed, and to drown the guilt by telling herself that Kitty was only using her anyway.

She wondered if Rachel had gone through the same thing. She'd caught the body language between them, after they'd followed Ororo's old team back from Valle Soleada. And the entire staff must have caught the sound of Rachel crying alone in their room, when she first learned that Peter Rasputin had returned—when Kitty just did what she always does.

Except for her, if she were honest with herself. Kitty had never done that to her. As far as she knew, that put her into rare company with Lockheed and Illyana.

So she didn't want to be Kitty's friend.

No one in their right mind would.

She stopped herself when she realized she had been playing with Kitty's nose. She interacted her hands beneath her head, and just stared up at the ceiling so that she wouldn't tempt herself into spending the rest of the morning looking at her...

She didn't want to be Kitty's friend. But if she were honest with herself, maybe she wouldn't mind being something more. And if she couldn't be what she wanted to be...

She wasn't sure what else there was.

Maybe she'd take it, all the same, if she ever figured out what to call it.

She could feel Kitty dreaming: it was that last day together. Lockheed was asleep in the bookshelf above Illyana's bed. Kitty was just sitting in her beanbag chair, pretending to listen to music and read comic books on her tablet—but really just watching her best friend struggling through a Pre-Calculus review.

Was it the healthiest thing for Kitty to obsess over? Probably not.

At least she wasn't dreaming about being trapped on that Bullet again. Or maybe she was. She was still just drifting through eternity, stripped of all agency or autonomy. Unable to influence her course through the universe, or to feel anything around her. She had just given herself a change in scenery to do it in.

But it was still better than dreaming about killing all of her friends again, Xi'an thought to herself. Hopefully, that was a good sign. And dreaming about being lost and alone, as she was doing at that moment... maybe that wasn't so strange.

It was amazing, to her, how easy it was: for them to fall back into old habits, without even noticing until after they'd already acted. Kitty was naturally—as much as evasive paranoia can be 'natural'—on guard, even while she was sleeping. When they lived together, after the layers of trust had started to interpose themselves between the defensive walls of self-loathing and misery, they eventually settled into a cautious pattern of... well, Xi'an realized, it was hard to put into words without making herself sound codependent.

It had just started out as a way to fine control their mutations, to avoid slacking off and putting oneself in danger if they ever needed to fight again. Kitty would close up her mind, and Xi'an would try to break through. Other times, Kitty would leave her mind opened and let Xi'an try to pick through the real self, versus garbage surface thoughts and interstitial misdirections. Sometimes she would just let Xi'an possess her, and then try to throw it off without phasing, while Xi'an fought back. No matter how good either of them was, the other had her own fair share of successes. She wasn't even sure when it happened, but eventually she had—or at least she thought she must have—seen enough of Kitty's uglier thoughts that the younger woman started being preferentially less defensive around her.

But no matter how much she might have begun to trust Xi'an's love for her, she would never be able to bring herself to extend that to the people around her at large. That's how it started, with Xi'an subtly, only partially, possessing her. Just enough that her own natural defenses, what Professor Xavier had once described as a 'telepathic deflector shield,' could extend to Kitty too. To let her finally get some sleep, safe in the knowledge that someone else was on guard for her.

When you finally saw her unguarded, truly at rest, it was impossible to ever look at Kitty again without remembering how young she actually was. She'd spent years fighting an endless war but was still only eighteen when they started living together... and really, who knows how Kitty's ability actually worked? She could still _be_ eighteen, for all that she was still dealing with the exact same pangs. She hadn't moved past any of it yet.

Logan, Scott, Erik, and Xavier had lied to themselves for years, telling each other that she had a casual maturity, even in the beginning. That her intelligence, her confidence in what she was doing, and her ability to understand their dream as they did meant that she could not have been a child. That made it ok to risk her life, they thought, as long as she looked like she knew what she was doing. And that it never occurred to them, that there was an alternate explanation to why a child would find their dreams for the future so appealing, of a world where everyone will _belong_, told her everything she needed to know about them and their own failures.

It was different for Xi'an, when she looked at Kitty. Their relationship was such, with the kids, with taking care of life together, and running the school, that she could sometimes almost pretend that she didn't see it. She saw it so clearly, but she could still delude herself into thinking that she didn't. But never when Kitty laughed. All of the stress, the wary confidence, and the pain that were so common a part of her face: none of them are really etched in to the landscape of her features like they would be in someone ten or fifteen years older.

The lines are there, but only until something kind, or mischievous, or delighting catches her eyes.

Then the lines just vanish, and don't return until she remembers who she is and who she doesn't want to be. And until she does, she could have been just any other pretty college girl.

Sometimes she wants to forget being the friend and the jilted lover and act the older sister again for just one more orphan girl. There was a part of her that just wanted to sweep Kitty up, bundled in all of those blankets, and stuff her into the car before she could wake up. She could just imagine the twins and Lockheed ready and waiting for them in the same idle fantasy. They could just drive, before Kitty could say anything to the contrary, away form the responsibilities they never asked for. The truth was she felt a lot like Kitty did, when it came to the others.

She had Rogue, Remy, Jean-Paul, and Cecilia—and the New Mutants, _of course_—but in general she couldn't feel appreciated by the people she worked with. Not for what she could offer the school. Not by Logan, or Henry, or Ororo. Telepathy was useful, experience with criminality was useful, and they would never turn down her money. That was all it came down to: she was a blunt weapon for emergencies, and an easy paycheck. But her experience as a teacher and a mentor? Her professional credentials and experience at managing a library or organizing research, and even having curated Professor Xavier's personal collection? None of those things meant anything to them. She doubted they even knew there _was_ a personal collection.

They used to talk about Alaska. They always talk about Alaska and what it meant to Kitty. For all that Ororo would claim the role for herself, Madelyne Pryor was the closest thing Kitty ever really had to the mothers in storybooks, excepting maybe Mariko Yashida in another life.

She could so easily imagine them driving out to Alaska.

She could _buy_ Alaska, if she dared to hope for something better than what they had been given. It would solve two of her problems at once—she'd never have to look at those accounts again.

They could just leave, the two of them and Lockheed and the twins, and let everything else sort itself out, before anything else was taken away from them. Would Logan let them go? Probably not. Not in the middle of his private war with with the other X-Men. And Rachel would find them, but she doubted that Rachel would take Logan's side over Kitty's. She wouldn't put the X-Men over Kitty's health. Unfortunately, she knew that Kitty would.

She would never leave. She'd stay with them until it finally killed her. And it _would_ eventually kill her, because she kept going back over and over again. Even a weightless person could only carry so much.

No matter how angry she was with them now, even if she ran away tomorrow, she'd still eventually be back there.

Some people are just ornery.

* * *

**19.**

When Xi'an woke up, she immediately regretted opening her eyes before they could adjust. After she'd rubbed the irritation out, she looked to her side—Kitty was already gone. Nothing so unusual; either that she wasn't there, or that Xi'an hadn't noticed her leaving.

Always gone by morning.

Same old lonely heartbreaker.

It was eleven fourteen according to her phone. She was thinking of trying to salvage another hour or two, but then Kitty turned up.

"Hey. I didn't want to wake you up," she said. "I called in sick for both of us, our classes are covered, and I talked to Lee. She said to stay out as long as you want, she doesn't have other plans."

Except for a pair of red chopsticks in her hair, and the press-on nails she was wearing, Kitty was dressed in what would be tempting for Xi'an to refer to as 'the least feminine thing imaginable.' That was, except for the absurdity of applying that phrase to Kitty—she looked adorable in anything.

Kitty didn't have any of her new wardrobe in Chicago, she only had clothes she wore in college. Evidently she had left a flat iron behind as well. She was using a pair of chopsticks to keep her hair twisted up loosely, except for a few framing strands, in a way that would have been impossible with her usual careless waves. Xi'an had noticed she'd done that a lot lately: decorative combs, and sometimes chopsticks. She'd gone gone a bit accessory crazy with her hair of late. It used to just be a plain barrette, an elastic band, or nothing.

It was an older suit, with slacks and a vest that fit well, but at the same time didn't really show anything off; it was something that Kitty bought in college, and left behind when she moved out. Ever since the Jean Grey School had opened, she stopped buying her suits in stores, and just had them made for her. You could talk about money changing people, but that was laughable when it came to Kitty, as someone who bought everything else she owned on the internet or in clearance sales at Sears.

"Hey!" she exclaimed, catching the periphery of Xi'an's thoughts. "I'll have you know, I have some _damned_ expensive clothes."

"You're the only person I know who can stretch one-hundred dollars into a week's worth of clothes."

"Did you see the stuff I wore while tending bar?"

"You still managed to buy all of it on a bartender's salary, without touching your savings, while helping me pay for the twins' school."

"Ok, how about this: Logan and Yukio once lured me to Kyoto under false pretenses, so they could drag me in to a measurement for a _five million yen_ furisode, for me to wear for my _seijin-shiki_."

"_You _didn't buy that, though."

"Of course not! I'm not wasting money on crap. Other people can buy it for me though, and I'll be all sweet and appreciate it."

"Do you still have it?"

"Yeah, its here," Kitty shrugged.

"Put it on," Xi'an blurted out.

"I'll just have to take it off again when we leave."

"You wear blue and yellow Kevlar, and leather, all day. What do you care if people think you look strange? Wear your kimono."

"It'll get ruined."

"You can phase through the snow."

Kitty was biting her lip, without any pressure behind it.

"You want to, don't you?"

"Kind of."

Being back in a suit always brought Kitty back to her own familiar brand of self-conscious discomfort, one that that she'd lived with for so long that it had become comforting in itself. The part of her that felt wrong and ill at ease, whenever she wasn't dressed like something out of a picture book of Feudal Japan, was always at its strongest when she was in menswear. There was an absurd part of Kitty that still felt like even a pair of blue jeans was borderline with cross-dressing, and Xi'an wasn't sure if constantly taunting it was the healthiest option at hand. But far be it for Xi'an Coy Manh to try to take a friend's quirks from her. If that's what made her happy, it was good enough.

"So why not?" Xi'an asked.

"I don't have anywhere to wear it to."

"Stop by. You can see the kids."

"Its not visiting wear," she said. And that would probably be the last of it.

Xi'an took a fast shower. She hadn't exactly put together an overnight bag, and none of her old clothes were still in the old apartment. Fortunately, Kitty had already washed her clothes, from the night before, and laid them out for her.

She sat around as she dried off and let Kitty make crepes for her, with whipped cream and strawberries. She had evidently stopped by at the store and bought the eggs, milk, butter, and etcetera only for Xi'an; she herself had already eaten earlier.

"What else did you buy?"

Kitty started to open her mouth to reply, but Xi'an slapped her hand on the table to break her attention.

"_Wait!_" Xi'an interrupted, quickly holding up a finger. "Let me guess: vodka, pickles, rice, and tea."

"Hah! You lose. The tea was in the cupboard."

"No! Damn it," she sighed in frustration. "But you _did_ buy something else, didn't you?"

"Not telling," Kitty grinned, folding her arms.

"Bagel?"

"Nope."

"Fish.

"Nope."

"...cucumber?" Xi'an hesitated to ask, her face scrunching together slightly.

"No, and no fair. You already had three wrong guesses."

"And three right ones!"

"It was rye bread. And—"

_ "I knew it! _That was my next guess. You're so predictable!"

"Sure, you say that _now_."

"No, really. Face it, Katherine, you put mayonnaise on everything, you're good chess, you like some very pretentious poetry, and you spent your childhood training to be a ballerina figure skater. Even when you're getting magic ninja feedback, you're still _predictable_."

"Hey, I'm just _traditional_. And you've got no room to talk. You're a _sexy_ _librarian_, and you're eating crepes."

Xi'an opened her eyes wide, feigning confusion.

"Only because you made them for me."

"Anyway, I felt nice so I also bought a bottle of your magic water for you, you know, speaking of which of us is predictable within her cultural stereotype."

Xi'an drank soda water and tonic water with basically everything. She still claimed she drank it to help with indigestion even though she'd never had problems with indigestion in her life (which she naturally attributed to drinking carbonated water).

"This from the woman who has to buy two bottles of vodka every week, and hides them behind the frozen vegetables so that no one will see."

Kitty was one of those deluded maniacs who thought that vodka could "scare away" illness. If she was never sick, it must be working!

"Don't have to hide it anymore! Oh my God, Shan. My old suite. It had _so much_ room for booze. Check this out: our architect was _stupid_. Our floor was just me, Logan, and the staff rooms, right? So, my rooms had a mirrored layout of Logan's, for symmetry. Makes sense. But wait! Logan wanted like an _actual_ bar in his room, and an unlimited budget can make lots of stupid ideas a reality. And then on top of that, I had, like, this huge kitchen and this full sized freezer, and all this pantry space. Holy shit, I crammed so much booze into that place."

"Is it still there?"

"Are you kidding? Ororo tossed it all and read me the riot act about how I'm not mature enough to drink, and I should have more respect for nature's plan for my body anyway."

"You should have told her it was Lockheed's."

"I tried! She didn't believe me. And it wasn't even a complete lie! The Scotch was all his."

"I'm happy that you have your morning routine again, even if its crazy."

"It felt good."

When she was done, and while Kitty was washing the dishes, Xi'an retrieved her jacket from the door hook. She still had Kitty's medication in the pockets.

"Is that the one Jean-Paul bought me?" Kitty asked, glancing at Xi'an's jacket.

Xi'an paused, before handing Kitty her pill bottles.

"Come on," she said, when Kitty was resistant. "You know you need to take them when you get weeks like this. You don't get a cheat day. You especially don't get four in a row."

"It was only three."

"Two, you mean."

Xi'an poured a glass of water for Kitty, who accepted it kind of grudgingly, but only stared at her pills.

"I'm not sure I even need it anymore, you know."

"Lets assume you do, until next time you have a checkup." She sighed facetiously. "We still have ice cream. If you like, I can make you an ice cream soda and hide your Amitriptyline inside of it."

In the end she just swallowed them one by one, and finished off the water without too much of a production.

"Hey...about last night..."

"You weren't entirely in your right mind."

"I still said some things—last night—that I probably shouldn't have."

"I know, but please don't pretend that you didn't mean to say the things you said."

"No, I did. I still do. But I shouldn't have _said_ it."

"Kitty, you don't have to apologize. I knew it was going to be like that when I went looking for you."

"I'm not crazy, Shan. I'm just angry, and it never really goes away anymore. It builds up and sometimes I'm angry enough not to care. But I know what I'm doing. I _always_ know what I'm doing. And sometimes I want to hurt you. Sometimes I want to blame you for ruining my life.

"I don't understand."

"Its stupid, but I was happier when I was neurotic about being just another Plain Jane, boring, social retard."

"You were _never_—"

"Yeah. I know. But I could lie to myself. I could tell myself that Piotr was just being nice to his sister's friend. That Illyana was just fooling around." She noticed the look on Xi'an's face at that last, and felt the flickering of surprise. "I'm not delusional, Shan. I remember all of our bad days just fine. She could be very cruel, over some very petty things. I just didn't care. Still loved her."

Like about speaking a Surzhyk instead of 'real' Russian. Piotr never said a thing, but even as a child Illyana thought it was a laugh. Loved to hear her read stories to her, or better yet, to hear her make them up. Loved to laugh at what she thought were the funny sounding made-up words. It carried through even into Illyana's teenage years. It made her feel, well... like she'd been _colonized_. Like a Siberian farm girl thought she was some borderland hick that she could mess around with before starting her real life. And now, years removed from Illyana's death, she could never have enough closure to put it behind her. She'd always wonder.

"We could fall asleep holding each other. We could just jaunt to Limbo if we were afraid of getting caught. Her telling me that she loved me, and I could believe her and still wonder if I wasn't just making myself into a joke. Just like I could convince myself every day that Doug and Pete were just desperate. But not you. Because you were this gorgeous, glamorous, sexy librarian—and you were shy and nervous, and tripping over words, even in French, around _me_."

"But you were just as miserable when you were here, alone, with no friends."

"I _know_ that. I know I was just as miserable before, and I still found my own reasons to hate myself. It was just... easier, to be lonely and tell myself I never had a choice anyway. That even if I weren't just a shifty loner, that people wouldn't find me interesting or fun or attractive enough to want to be around."

They finished up and Kitty took her back to Salem. It was an even smaller production than Illyana had made it the night before. She just had Xi'an take her hand, and phased her free palm partly into one of their walls. She only had to concentrate for a second, until their particles had merged with the mass of the wall. Then, she just let them turn into a wave, and ride the universe back to Salem Center. It was a freezing morning, once again, and they were standing on top of still more packed-down snow. But at least Kitty was still phasing them, so it wasn't so bad to Xi'an's overly sensitive flesh and blood.

"That's still so unsettling," Xi'an said.

"At least you didn't throw up this time."

"Oh Lord, don't remind me."

"Hey, relax. Everyone does the first few times."

"You could have just used Illyana's sword, couldn't you have?"

"It was such a nice morning, I didn't want to ruin it by taking a hike through hell."

"Ok, I can see that. Fair enough." Xi'an turned more serious. "You know what they're all going to think, right? We spent the night together, I'm wearing the same clothes, I'm wearing some of _your_ clothes, and you cooked me breakfast."

Kitty let a few seconds pass by until they'd stretched on almost too far—or maybe that was just Xi'an imagining conflict where there was certainty.

"You were right about me, ok? I did everything I could to drive Pete away. I ran the first chance I had from Piotr. I wrecked Rachel, made her run away for another galaxy, and I did it out of spite. I wish I could give you some pithy reason for it all. I don't know. I'm afraid of long term commitment because of my father? Piotr wrecked me, and now I'm just compelled to wreck the people I care about? Or maybe I got betrayed just one too many times by people I thought cared about me, that were just using me—or, worse, that just thought it was funny. It wouldn't matter. And I _never_ meant for what happened between us to end like it did. I never meant for us to happen at all. We just did, before I knew what was going on."

"Do you regret it? Even a little?"

"Maybe I do, but, do you really want to know? Don't you think I've given you enough of your own regrets, without asking you to hold on to some of mine too? I'm not going to pretend I can change, but maybe I'm just sick of caring. I'm a basket case anyway, but I've had enough of worrying about what they think about me. They'll just think what they want anyway. And we've got two kids, and a space dragon, to worry about and they probably deserve better."

"Doesn't it follow that even without everything else, you have your feelings for Illyana, and you have Lockheed? If your heart just isn't big enough for anything else, you shouldn't need to feel bad about that. If it gets in the way now and again, you don't need to feel like a horrible person—it isn't a character flaw."

"Hey, maybe not. But its still a _design_ flaw."

"You're a woman, not an omelet. No one designed you."

"Culinary metaphor?"

"It seemed apt."

"Yeah. Apt alright. Broke a few eggs and stirred me around. Mixed in some other bits and burned me until I sizzled. The only difference is there wasn't anyone behind it all. Just nature and circumstances. The truth is I probably do use people. I don't mean to, but I do. What was it you said? I'm looking for something, and I wont find it? You're right. I am looking for something. I want to belong, but I can't. Shan, I don't feel the way that people tell me I should be able to feel. I never have. I used to wonder. Nights with with nameless men I'd never call back or see again, and doomed romances with the only ones I would. You can say whatever you want about how I treat people, I deserve it. But I _did_ love Piotr. And Pete. And Doug. I know I did, I couldn't have just_ imagined_ them. I loved them but I still couldn't make it work. Maybe that was just it—maybe I'm just wired differently. That's what I told myself, for a long time. But it didn't matter. In the end, I couldn't make things work with you or Rachel either. Its not the people I'm with that are the problem, its me that's wrong. Its always been me that's wrong."

"Its ok if you don't feel about us the way that we feel about you, you know that, right? Its not what you feel that bothers people, its the way you treat us. Its all the lies, and its how you just shut down on us when making it work it gets hard. You could have saved all of us a lot of pain by being honest with us when you needed to be."

"I know. I don't like hurting people Xi'an, but its just too easy sometimes. It comes naturally to me."

"Please don't," Xi'an interrupted, when she noticed how close they were standing, and how the gap had shrunk during the last intermission.

Kitty just nodded, squeezing her hand briefly instead of slipping into a hug.

"And I know that sometimes, it makes me... I'm not an easy person to..." Kitty trailed off.

"Love?"

"Yeah...that's the one."

"At least you're not boring." She pulled her hand free there, letting the cold freeze her breath to her face.

What she really meant was "apology accepted," but God help you if you make the mistake of telling Katherine Pryde that she has something to apologize for—and especially not when she was offering it freely.

"Yeah. At least there's that"

By which she meant, "thank you, Shan," and maybe even just a little bit of "I love you too, Shan."

Maybe just a little.

* * *

**20.**

"You can stay with me for a while, if you want."

"That wouldn't really be appropriate."

"I do have a couch, you know. And carpeting on the floor, if you prefer."

"I don't want to give the kids a wrong idea. I don't know what I'm going to do, but it wont be that hard to figure it out. I can, I don't know, maybe Rogue? Hell, I could maybe ask Jean-Paul if I can apartment sit for him for a while, until he gets his shit figured out. I'll be fine though, you don't have to worry about me."

"Okay. I'll try not to. But, just to be clear, I wasn't joking last night. I will definitely kill you, if you ever want me to."

"You seem really eager to get that all straightened out. Do you have a busy schedule coming up?"

"No, what I have is Nga's talent show, and I was hoping you'd help me solve that problem."

"What's she doing?"

"Taking the audience's pictures, and editing them in real time."

"Like what, digital touch ups?"

"No, I think she's just re-sizing for frames, and printing them out as gifts."

"Oh My God. That's going to be hell. Do I have to go to that?"

"Not if I kill you."

"And you'll get to spend at least a few weeks in prison. That's a good reason to miss it."

"I thought so."

The next Xi'an heard about it, when the dust of their latest disaster had settled, Kitty was back with Scott and Erik, and running her own team the way she wanted to—with a little bit of help from one Illyana Rasputina II.

It looked to Xi'an like Kitty was trying to figure things out, for once.

She didn't know how long it would last.

She doubted it'd be for long though.

People always want to change at first, but then, when they think enough time has passed to get away with it, they just go back to their same old bad habits and pretend it never happened.

Some people are just ornery like that.


End file.
